Snapshot: Poquoson From An Acorn

Teresa Crowson: Where the teacher's concern was that there were some other things kind of missing, 
but she couldn't quite pinpoint what they were. Trying to find where that little missing link was, what is 
it we needed to be able to work on to get him to be in a less restrictive environment and be successful in 
school, and so that's where the VB-MAPP came in.
There really were some functional communication deficits going on that were leading to behaviors, 
within just a matter of a couple weeks; the pre-school teacher flew with it. Once we pinpointed what 
the needs were she modified what she did in the classroom to hon in on those skills, and we saw him 
flourish.
Maria Johnson: He really did really well on his reading. In the play area, he's struggling. So what we're 
going to work on now is how can we help him play. And sometimes that might be using what he's good 
at with reading, like let's read social stories about playing. 
Jessica Adams: Associating visual supports is really major.
For all the other kids, it was a really easy skill but for him, just making that connection of what these 
clues tell us. So I started with, he could read the word outside, and he could label it but he just didn't 
make that association.
Maria Johnson: As their administering the VB-MAPP, they were able to say, this is where we need to be 
either starting from or continuing from or focusing on. If they're sitting here trying to drill x, y, and z to 
him but it's a, b, and c he needs work on. Then they're not going to go anywhere and everybody's 
miserable. 
Teresa Crowson: And I also saw change in the practice of the teacher towards other students in her 
classroom. Not necessarily those with Autism, beyond just our little acorn student that we started with.
Jessica Adams: The VB-MAPP may be mostly designed for students with Autism, but I also used it with a 
lot of other members of my classroom. Really identify what they might need to work on.
One thing, I think was really important when we were putting together the VB-MAPP kit, is it not being 
overwhelming and a good way to organize it. But we just went through and labeled them people, body 
parts, transportation, school, animals, ways that made sense for us.
Teresa Crowson: From there, when we did the training, it was great to see it expand out to other schools 
in our division as well as other teachers.
Lauren Arner: So, we had the VB-MAPP training and I found it to be a really effective tool to help 
classroom teachers see where you can do language training. In the classroom, it kind of shows you how 
language functions, as behavior.
Trish Boyle: We make a lot of assumptions about our kids. They're very social, they have a lot of verbal 
skills, and it was interesting to see that we might be missing some very big holes.
Lauren Arner: From there, we really thought of the kids that we had and a better way to show those 
teachers where the gaps were. There's kind of a speech pathology version of approaching language 
learning, in terms of receptive and expressive language. And then there's looking at it from a behavior 
standpoint and integrating those two things for this one student. I think it has been really helpful.