Experts' Corner


Healing Autism
Dr. Annette Cartaxo, MD
Dr. Garima Jain, ND.

Calming Strategies for Asperger's
Kathy Lindert

TeamHope Groups

Winner's Club specifically focuses on meeting the needs of children with Asperger's, High Functioning Autism, ADHD, and NVLD. These children can be described as verbal, but continue to struggle with play skills, making and maintaining friendships, and understanding the complexity of social interactions. Participants generally have IQ's within the normal range and can be independent in the classroom for at least 15 minutes. Methodologies will pair a cognitive approach with a Developmental/Relationship based intervention. Awareness of self and others will be explored through language, actions, and sensory experiences. Recognizing and understanding emotional intent, motives of peers, and sharing life experiences will be facilitated by using games, videos, children's literature and symbolic play. Inferential thinking and making "best guesses" as well as if/then/what types of thinking will also be targeted. Videotaping will occasionally be utilized to provide feedback to the children for self assessment.

Kids At Play offers a developmentally appropriate, inclusive setting for children to acquire, expand, and explore their potential under the guidance and supervision of a multidisciplinary team. The goal of our program is to provide an environment and activities that encourage child initiated interactions and communication. We emphasize a child centered, developmental approach to learning influenced by the philosophies of Dr. Stanley Greenspan, Dr. Steven Gutstein, Dr. Barry Prizant, and play therapy. Parents are provided the opportunity to express their concerns regarding skills or activities they feel would be beneficial to their child through our consultation process. Each child's individual needs and developmental profile are considered when planning activities. These activities are chosen and based upon the needs, functional level, and skills to be targeted.

Sessions typically move from unstructured to structured settings with speech, language, oral motor, gross motor, fine motor, sensory and tasting experiences incorporated throughout the session. We focus on fostering engagement, functional use of objects, problem solving, expansion of play schemes and social interactions.

All of our sessions are conducted by a staff of experienced professionals who work with the children in small dyads or triads. Each child is given optimal attention and staffing is based upon the needs of the children with a minimum of 2:1 ratio. Peer models are often available and encouraged by the staff to provide supportive and positive interaction with the children.

Our groups are an hour in length and are offered on Saturdays. We are a therapeutic program and as such accept a minimum of children. Interested parties need to reserve their space.

Cooking up Comprehension offers an excellent functional curriculum that increases skills in comprehension, sequencing, categorization, following multistep directions, sharing, cooperation, and problem solving via cooking activities. Appropriate for a variety of ages and functional levels. Instruction has a heavy emphasis on literacy, and practice in oral and written language composition. Lessons progress from providing the most support in the form of visual aides, to less support in the form of the cloze technique essays, to the most challenging- recall of sequences and independent composition of essays.