Adventures in Autism

Started working on my first autism assessment. The kid is completely adorable. He is verbal however there is pretty much zero reciprocal communication and lots of echolalia. I've now done about 3 different observations on him, a time on task in the gen ed classroom, and two play ground ones. It is interesting to see that he has no problem hanging out with a ton of other kids, bumping into them or being touched by them, but he never speaks to them. I gave him some select parts of the WISC and that was a big adventure. He was tough to keep on task because one thing you would show him would set him off on a story or tangent of some sort. He kept repeating things that he had done during the testing the previous day which he really seemed to enjoy. There is something amazingly endearing about the kid. Couldn't really tell you what it was. I also got to give a couple of portions of the ADOS. That is a completely rad assessment. I love how it is set up with all toys of different sorts in order to attempt to evoke an interaction with the student. My supervisor obtained consent from the parent to video tape the whole test which was really cool. It made it so you didn't have to scramble around and take notes while trying to pay attention to every minute detail of what the kid is doing. The kiddo definitely has difficulties in speech and reciprocal communication, but we really didn't observe any stereotyped behaviors during the testing. However, according to his aide he does finger flap in front of his eyes. I just haven't seen it yet. Working with this little dude has been really awesome, I am so glad I've had the opportunity so early on in my internship!