Category: BLOCS News

This week, we’re proud to introduce you to Emma Henson! Emma is one of our BCBAs, which means that she works with our behavior therapists to provide therapy to children. As a BCBA, she designs, implements, and supervises children’s individual programming, provides supervision for the early intervention groups, and also provides direct therapy. In other words, she’s kept quite busy making sure children get the best care possible!

Emma’s interest in ABA started as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas. She found herself interested in the brain and human behavior, and after observing a BCBA leading an early-intervention classroom, she knew that she wanted to pursue a Master’s in ABA. This led her to Austin, where she attended the University of Texas, earning her Master’s in Special Education with an emphasis in Autism and Developmental Disabilities.

Since joining Building BLOCS in June 2016, Emma has enjoyed watching everyone as a team succeed in reaching a child’s goal. “The best part about this job is the moment when the whole team (the child, the therapist, the supervisor, the family)…has been working so hard on one goal (for example, potty training) and the child starts to achieve success,” remarks Emma. “[I]t’s a huge milestone!” In addition to achieving success in big goals, she also gets to witness small goals getting reached daily in her favorite activity, pretend play. Emma notes that children with ASD often need more prompting and modeling in arranging props and choosing roles, but once they catch on, their creativity is “magical.” It’s so much fun to watch their sometimes hilarious spins on traditional stories and play activities!

Generating creativity in adults, on the other hand, can be a bit more challenging. “After you’ve re-enacted the three little pigs a million times, you can’t always find a way to make it new and exciting,” Emma notes. “But just when my creativity fails me, the kids come up with some out of this world idea.” Sometimes the most challenging moments are those that prove the most rewarding, and seeing children’s creativity shine is truly wonderful.

This week, we’re proud to feature Laura Gillingham, one of our talented Speech-Language Pathologists. She started working at Building Blocs in July of 2015 and has been changing lives and brightening our days ever since.

Laura was inspired to become an SLP when a family member discovered that their baby would be born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate. She shadowed a number of speech pathologists and was further impressed by their wide knowledge base of different specialties. But what was most powerful was the ability to change lives. Laura comments that “the ability to communicate and experience the world is central to the human experience, and I knew that as a speech pathologist, I would be directly involved in helping others achieve this.” For Laura, speech pathology serves as a way of helping people both to improve their communication skills and enrich their lives as a whole.

At Building Blocs, Laura’s favorite activity is story time, since it is an enjoyable way to work on multiple goals at once. Not only is it fun and engaging for the kids, but it is also a great time to work on targets like pointing, labeling, answering questions, and following directions. While stories are obviously great for speech activities, they are also an excellent way to get to know each child and what they enjoy most.

One of Laura’s favorite aspects of her job is working with families. “Family involvement is essential to each client’s success,” says Laura. She recognizes that families have to be advocates for their children and support them in speech development at home as well. Providing the guidance to help families do that is incredibly rewarding.

Finally, there are no better words to describe the challenges and rewards of her job than Laura’s own. “Working in early intervention,” she says, “I am in a unique position to hear children talk, respond to their name, and engage with others for the first time. The days and weeks leading up to these special moments can be full of ups and downs, and can be both exciting and discouraging for everyone involved. In spite of the hard work, nothing is more rewarding than seeing the joy on a child’s face during the moment when they finally realize their words mean something.”

Meet our newest BCBA, Cayley Miles! Cayley has been an ABA Therapist at Building BLOCS for the past year and a half, and on Wednesday she received her BCBA. This week, she’ll be kicking off our “Meet our Team” blog series, where therapists and speech pathologists tell you about their jobs, from their favorite activities with the children to what makes it most challenging.

Cayley first decided to pursue ABA therapy during college, when she volunteered with Jester’s Program. This program paired adults and children with disabilities with professional directors to write and perform their own musical production.  Continue reading “Meet our Team: Cayley Miles”