Course Description:

Day 1:

Have you worked with children or adolescents who have difficulty recognizing the thoughts, beliefs, knowledge and intentions of themselves and others? Because of these deficits, they struggle to make inferences about what others might do. What about the children who lack awareness of their own emotions, what triggers their emotions and struggle to regulate their emotions? Do you know the adolescent who lacks the ability to use facial, body, and vocal cues to recognize or infer the emotions of others and is unable to recognize the reason or cause of these emotions? These deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) are at the heart of social communication difficulties exhibited by those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and social communication disorders (SCD), and many other conditions that affect communication skills.

Join theory of mind expert, Carol Westby, PhD, CCC-SLP, and discover the developmental stages of ToM from precursors in infancy through higher-level thinking in adolescents. You will learn how to identify the patterns of and severity of ToM deficits to effectively match intervention strategies to the child’s specific needs. Through video examples, children’s books and movies and pictures you will learn to design and implement strategies to develop the social-emotional underpinnings of ToM. Walk away with the tools necessary to …

• Assess development of ToM from infancy through adolescence
• Engage children in emotional sharing and joint attention
• Foster autobiographical memory and ability to think about the future
• Improve the vocabulary and sentence patterns necessary for ToM
• Use children’s books and movies to develop interpersonal cognitive and affective ToM
• Identify multiple contextual cues as a way to improve ToM
• Develop intrapersonal ToM to regulate behavior and emotions
• Determine which profiles respond to particular interventions using current research

Day 2:

Join Carol Westby, PhD, CCC-SLP, internationally-renowned expert on play assessment and development and language-literacy relationships and discover current play theories, the development of the four dimensions of play in young children (birth-5 years), and the interrelationships of these dimensions of play to children’s language, cognition, social-emotional skills, self-regulation and literacy. You will walk away with an effective tool that offers a way to assess young children’s symbolic play skills – organized by developmental level. Attention will be given to the ways that language learning disabilities, autism, and socio-economic/cultural variations influence early language, play, and literacy development.

Attend and you will learn current intervention strategies to:

• Advance phonological skills and comprehension for emergent literacy using playful practice
• Promote a development of various dimensions of play and the interrelationships of the dimensions of play to children’s language, social-emotional skills, self-regulation and literacy
• Encourage the interactions essential for social-emotional development
• Facilitate children’s understanding of the temporal, cause-effect, and social relationships that exist in the world and that are critical for comprehension of social and academic interactions
• Stimulate language for interpersonal communication and abstract reasoning
• Nurture children’s ability to interpret and respond appropriately to the needs, desires, and roles of others and to use this knowledge to infer the thoughts of others
• Promote children’s ability to organize and monitor their own behavior so they can become independent, self-motivated learners
• The intervention activities that you will learn work for ESC children and pre-school children with disabilities

Register for one or both seminars:
1/28/16
Day 1: Theory of Mind: Strategies to Develop Social-Emotional Skills for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder & Social Communication Disorders

1/29/16
Day 2: Play & Language: The Roots of Literacy