Sorting and Sequencing

Teaching Tips

From Diane Halpin

I used fuzzy little mice, buttons, tokens from Chuckie Cheese, Plastic rings from a party pack at Toys' r Us. Party supply stores will often have cheap packages of multiples that can be combined for this sorting. There is also this bizzare set of plastic animals that has black, green, yellow, and tan horses, pigs, sheep and cows. There are also little and big ones of each animal. They come in a bucket. I have only seen them at pharmacy toy departments, never the big toy store. They are also great when you get to teaching attributes I found that it was easiest to teach B5 with 3d stimuli with putting each item in an identical container, then fade the container. For two dimensional stimuli, I do a yahoo and google picture search of say, dogs, flowers and computers. I then print them out, paste em up and presto! The decks of commercially available picture cards generally have 6 pictures of cats, chairs, shoes, etc too, if you use those. The containers also help at first.

For B19 (refers to ABLLS task number), rubber bugs work great as do rubber vehicles; the dollar store is my favorite reinforcement/cheap stimuli place! Also Oriental Trading Company has quantities of weird little doodads that come in handy. If your child gets distracted with the stimuli, you might use poker chips. There is a lot of kids software (ready for math with pooh and jumpstart preschool ) that have sequencing activities for generalization. Actually kids' educational software has tons and tons of visual performance skills, and if your guy likes computers it's a great way to sneak in some incidental learning. Don't forget to read up on the joint control procedure for the sequencing....works wonders.

Joint Control

From David Sidener, Ph.D

Joint control (joint stimulus control) occurs when the speaker says the same thing (same topography) as two different operants and the "match" between the two controls some other behavior, usually the selection of some stimulus (but the sequencing scenario works as well). Let's say you're trying to teach expanded "Go to plus action", you want the child to go some distance and then do an action. You say, "Go to the door and wave." As the child goes to the door, he repeats (out loud or to himself) "door and wave...door and wave." This self-echoic produces the first stimulus ("door"). As he gets to the door he tacts the door. This tact produces the second stimulus (also "door"). When the response products of the two operants match (he says "door" as both a self-echoic and tact) they jointly control the designated response (in this case, waving). The value of taking advantage of joint control as a teaching strategy is that the self-echoic performs a mediating, or self-prompting role which can help a child to do lengthy or complicated tasks without additional prompts from someone else.