Early Intervention Strategies for Success

Sharing What Works in Supporting Infants & Toddlers and the Families in Early Intervention

 

Maybe you’ve felt this before…you are on a visit and it’s the parent’s turn to practice using an intervention strategy. Perhaps you just modeled it, or you and the parent came up with an idea and want to give it a try. When you ask the parent if she’d like to try it, she averts …

As an early interventionist, you are in a help giving profession and you want to ensure that you are offering families help that is relevant to the family’s needs. You can achieve that goal by meeting parents where they are when you first engage with them and build from there.

A large component of meeting parents where …

You are committed to helping families practice using intervention strategies during your visits. You truly believe that’s an important part of the intervention process. You’re very aware of your own interactions during visits and try hard not to “hog” all of the child’s attention. You redirect the child’s attention from you back to the parent …

While working through the emotions that come with parenting a child with disabilities, there was also a steep learning curve. A journey of awareness that I had to go through in preparation to parent my child. As the mother of a child with disabilities, my journey has included emotions that many professionals would easily recognize …

It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m banging my head on the steering wheel after my home visit. Why? Because I’ve spent the last hour coaching this family to stop giving their two year old a bottle when she can drink from a sippy cup, straw, and an open cup. It’s not like we haven’t worked on …

Think about the following perspectives during the Assessment for Service Planning and IFSP development process:

Team Members ArriveSC: I arrive to facilitate the assessment for service planning and IFSP development for Jacoby. I meet Franklin, occupational therapist, and Maria, developmental specialist. We all walk in and I introduce Marilyn and Kevin (Jacoby’s mother and father) to Franklin …

On the blog, we often speak from the perspective of the EI professional. Switching up this “voice” a bit is not only fun, but it may help us understand more about the culture of some of our families. The tips I will share are from the millennial parent’s viewpoint in hopes of using their interpretation …

When we whittle early intervention down to its core, I think it’s all about interactions. Interactions between the child and caregiver, first and foremost…interactions between the child and the environment (toys, sofa cushions, spoons and cups, buttons on the TV remote, the family dog)…interactions between the EI practitioner and caregiver that facilitate positive interactions with …

Assessments continue to evolve in a variety of settings including the medical and educational fields. Though these assessments look and feel different, there is one very large commonality.  True individualization is ultimately valued. As we move toward conducting functional assessments, we have to learn how to gather information differently. Rather than interviewing the parent straight …

In Part 1 of this series, we met Phoebe, a service coordinator, and Wyatt’s family. Wyatt had just been referred to early intervention, and his family was eager to begin services but feeling overwhelmed by the process and their son’s new diagnosis of cerebral palsy. We began the discussion about the DEC Recommended Practices (2014) under …

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