By Olga Yushina | Project leader
There are 4 girls in our project. Statistically, boys end up on the autism spectrum 4 times more often than girls do. Our project, too, has 17 boys and 4 girls.
One of the girls is Eva. She is a delicate, graceful girl with blond hair. Eva has a very beautiful mother and a musician father. Both parents are willing to do whatever it takes for their girl, and provide home support for all activities and recommendations that our project specialists give them.
Eva is living with a rather severe form of autism. She came to our project three years ago. At the age of three and a half. Back then, she rarely smiled, she wasn’t verbal, she couldn’t use the bathroom or feed herself, and it was almost impossible to interest her in any joint activity. Eva had prevalently field behavior – which means seeing the goal and not seeing the obstacles, and she also had some self-destructive behavior – auto-aggression. Testing revealed total communication and social deficit. Eva spent most of her day auto-stimulating.
As a participant of our project, Eva was given a personal tutor. We developed a program of behavior correction and self-care skill training for her, introduced a method of alternative communication, scheduled speech therapy sessions, designed an individual adaptive physical therapy program, and put together a long-term program for overcoming social deficits – that is, we created a route for Eva’s step-by-step inclusion into a mainstream preschool class.
This year, Eva is set to start first grade in school. In the three years, she has learned to use the bathroom and to feed herself; she is making great progress in speech therapy sessions and is now able to spend time on a playground with other children. Eva uses the PECS system for communication, and attends mainstream art classes, clay sculpting, cutting and pasting, and drawing with the rest of the children. She has many one-on-one classes. She has learned to sit and do something at a desk, and to follow an adult’s instructions. The self-destructive behavior is now a very rare occurrence, and some of the behavior problems have been eliminated. Eva laughs, looks people in the eye, and can ask an adult form something she needs. She has learned to wait. Every day, she makes us happy and proud, and every day is a small victory for her.
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