Red Nose Day & Getting Busy with PECS

To celebrate Red Nose Day for Comic Relief, we made some Red Nose Cakes for after school!!  I also impressed myself with some homemade cupcake wrappers, which looked fab! (they are gorgeous to use, but pricey to buy in the shops, especially when the cakes are just for us!). The kids loved them, particularly the icing!

Homemade Cupcake Wrappers

Red Nose Cupcakes

 

I got the boys Red Noses from Sainsburys, but their little snozzes are too small to keep them on!

It was a beautiful sunny day today, and Rich was home from work really early, so we had some fun in the garden before tea!

         

Archie loves the trampoline

      

Joyful bouncing!

 

We had a busy weekend working on Archie’s PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System). I’ve been taking photographs of everything I can think of in his/our lives, laminating them and putting them on a big key chain, or on the kitchen wall. He is so visual, and we’ve already had success in showing him photos of the main places we go to in the week before we go, so he understands where he’s going; and he’s been making choices between pictures of food/snack items we show him, for a while. The next step is to get him to initiate the communication with them and to develop his understanding of “now” & “next” – something that’s tough at the moment: if it doesn’t happen instantly for him, he gets very upset! Over the weekend, he repeatedly brought us the photo of the juice bottle and said “kee” (drink), and twice brought me the cereal picture (so we had to give him some, despite it being 3.30pm, lol!). It was brilliant to see! Hopefully he will pick it up quickly and we can develop some more language as well as understanding!

Archie's PECS Keyring

 

Archie's Wall PECS

 

I’ve also put together a “Bag of Tricks” for Preschool to use. They’re having a tough time calming him if he gets very distressed, so am hoping that if they can get him to a quiet space,  a bag of goodies will get his attention enough to calm down & re-engage! We can only try, lol!

Archie's "Bag of Tricks!"

Archie's Bag of Tricks