Our Clients
Reach the Peak offers behaviour intervention services for neurodiverse children and youth. Although our clients are typically individuals with Autism Spectrum and Related Disorders, we recognize the need for quality intervention services for all neurodiverse children and proudly extend our services to neurodiverse children who are not on the Autism Spectrum.
Our Philosophy
- All children can learn. If a child is not learning, we need to change how we are teaching.
- The most effective interventions focus on pivotal skills such as engagement, initiation, imitation, communicative intent and joint attention.
- Use positive and pro-active strategies to solve behaviour challenges.
- Learning needs to be fun. We use play and highly motivating activities to help children meet social-emotional milestones.
- A positive relationship between a child and his/her behaviour interventionists is the foundation for good treatment outcomes.
- Family input and participation is essential when developing and implementing intervention plans.
- It is vital to give the tools we know work for children to the people in a child’s life so that positive learning occurs throughout the day and across environments.
Our Methods
Our program uses effective, research-tested methods based on the principles of applied behaviour analysis (ABA) to teach children. We use Naturalistic, Developmental ABA similar to well-researched programs such as Pivotal Response Training, the Denver Model and JASPER. Some of the key features of ABA teaching methods include:
- The use of positive reinforcement to teach new skills and to increase the frequency of behaviours and mental processes necessary for language, imagination, perspective taking, empathy, frustration tolerance, and social reciprocity.
- Positive and proactive measures are used to make learning fun and successful
- Complex skills are broken down into teachable steps.
- All goals are measurable and observable. Data is collected on all goals to ensure optimal progress.
- Prompting is used to ensure a high rate of success and prompts are then faded systematically to promote independence.
- The ABA learning paradigm has been shown in the research literature to effectively teach social skills, play skills, communication skills, social referencing, theory of mind, motor skills, self-help skills, academic skills, self-management skills and cognitive skills.
For more information, www.interactingwithautism.com has descriptions of several intervention methods.