Beads, Birds and Babies

We love stories – here’s one about a mother and her child, learning to communicate and problem-solve through play. My son has begun his Autism Outreach therapy.  For those of you unfamiliar with it – it’s a developmental therapy offered for children with autism.  And it’s basically using play to help kids hit those developmental milestones.  Our therapist is amazing.  […]

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What Are Developmental Therapies?

The goal of developmental autism therapies is to build the ability of parents to understand, emotionally support, interact with, and guide their children.  Challenges embedded in fun, natural interactions leads to learning. Developmental therapies use information about how children develop social connection and communication, and work to support children’s movement along that pathway. Usually parents are trained to work with their children […]

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PLAY Project Workshop Coming to Winnipeg!

If you’re interested in developmental therapies in general, and DIR/Floortime in particular, you might have heard of the PLAY Project.  It’s a DIR-based program in Michigan, run under the leadership of Richard Solomon.  This video provides a sense of what the program is like. The PLAY Project recently completed a three‐year trial looking at 128 children in five different settings. […]

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Getting Out There: RDI in the Summertime

Originally published on RDI Connect. Those of us raising children in Canada are keenly aware of and attuned to the seasons and their impact on the flow of our daily lives. There is nothing like living through a harsh, bitterly cold winter, then being able to throw off our winter boots and mitts on the first warm, sweet spring day. When the temperatures […]

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One Size Doesn’t Fit All

We believe it’s important for families of children with autism to have well-supported therapy options to choose from, because every child and family’s needs are different.  We are here to inform families of their options for autism intervention in Manitoba and to advocate for developmental therapies as one option for supporting a diverse group of children.

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DIR Level 2 at a Glance: Engagement and Relatedness

This post is part of a series, taking a quick look at each developmental level, according to the work of Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder in their DIR/Floortime framework.  As a child grows, they add new skills to what they learned in the previous levels.  You can find the list of related posts here. When we meet children on the autism […]

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Understanding DIR/Floortime

What is Floortime all about anyway? This post (the first in a series) is about explaining what DIR/Floortime is, in ordinary parent language.  How does this approach to autism intervention help us understand our kids better, and what strategies does it offer?  I write this as a parent who has gone through training in our local program, taken one online […]

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On the Right Track

Here’s a big question: if all children learn best through play, why would our children with autism be any different? At the World Conference of Early Childhood and Education held in Moscow, Russian in 2010, the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) published a statement (available here) on play-based learning.  They underscored the enormous importance of purposeful play based […]

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