Overcoming Autism: Finding the Answers, Strategies, and Hope That Can Transform a (Paperback)<!--aoeui-->
by Lynn Kern Koegel (Author), Claire LaZebnik (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Autism-Finding-Strategies-Transform/dp/...
Right after my son's diagnosis, I found this book at the library. It changed our lives! I notice that 24 out of 25 reviews on amazon.com give it 5 out of 5 stars. This book is written by a mom about her son's recovery from autism, but it is also a little bit about a therapy called PRT. After reading about PRT, I (my son) was lucky enough to be accepted into a language study at the Autism Lab at UCSD (University of California San Diego). They flipped a coin to decide if we would receive 23 weeks of intensive PECS training or 23 weeks of intensive PRT training. I was thrilled to get PRT training. We were also able to meet and work with Dr. Laura Schreibman who is a colleage of Dr. Lynn Koegel who is affiliated with UCSB. (University of California Santa Barbara). The Koegel's helped pioneer PRT.
Our son was almost completely non-verbal when we began the study. The strategy was to isolate highly motivating toys, foods, and tickles and use those to motivate my son to make an utterance to request the preferred items. It worked! We were able to shape the utterances into actual words. He can repeat and request so many things now. These days we are working heavily on oral-motor skills to improve his speech clarity and we are incorporating a lot of PECS and more PRT to encourage more functional language.
