Tom is flying high

Tom and I have been continuously working on communication through eye gaze. It seems to be something that everyone is very interested in learning about and I get lots of questions about how Tom is doing with the eye gaze. I thought I would show you just how well he is doing.

Tom and I incorporate the eye gaze into everything we do. All activities now have the ability to be used with the eye gaze. If we are baking the Grid Pad comes with us, during messy play or just if we fancy a chat. It has very much been a gradual process to get it to this point and still we have lots of off periods where Tom is just too tired to use his eye gaze. At this time I just wait until Tom is ready again. I do not want to push it too much so Tom starts to lose motivation.

On Wednesday we had one of the best sessions yet with the eye gaze. We were doing bubbles as a chilled activity and as always I gave Tom the Grid Pad incase he wanted to eye gaze with me. Rather than ask Tom a load of questions and wait for him to respond, I use the eye gaze to model the language.

I recently attended a Smartbox training course about how to get the best out of Grid 3. They gave me so much more knowledge and confidence. Here they showed us the best way to model the software Grid 3, sometimes you can get in a loop of asking a question and waiting for a response rather than just having a conversation, this is why modelling is so important. If you haven't seen he Smartbox training course and you use Grid 3, check it out. I will leave a link at the bottom of the page, it gave me so much more confidence in working with the Grid software, it is also a great way to meet other people that use communication aids.

So with our bubbles activity I started to model the language for Tom. He started to respond pretty quickly and pushed me out of the front seat and he started to drive the activity. Tom was managing to use a large variety of language in a meaningful way. He was really focusing on what was happening round him and listening to what I was saying, thinking of his next step and then picking the appropriate language for this.

I managed to capture a small amount of the activity on video for you all to enjoy.

To see the video you'll need the password 'Progress1'.

You can see just how well Tom is doing with his eye gaze. This week has been consistently good with the eye gaze and he seems to be really motivated by the the thought of being able to fully express his thoughts and feelings. The time it takes him to think about what he wants to say and him actually saying it is becoming shorter and shorter and he is far more confident with the word placement on the screen. The familiarity of Grid 3 is certainly helping Tom with his progress.

For now we are going to continue with what we are doing. I will always give Tom the opportunity to communicate using the eye gaze but I will never force it. Just like us, sometimes Tom doesn't want to talk to anybody!

I am also continually learning, I spend a lot of time researching and learning how I can help Tom. Even from this short video clip I am able to analyse my communication with Tom and I learn from that and try to improve. This constant evaluation is really important to ensure we don't fall into any bad habits.

I hope you've enjoyed Tom's Eye Gaze update. Keep your eyes peeled for more.

SMARTBOX TRAINING: https://thinksmartbox.com/smart-support/smartbox-training/