LEAST-TO-MOST

The next help strategy is a least-to-most strategy. A least-to-most strategy is a series of two or more levels of help, arranged to provide increasing amounts of assistance. If your child does not respond correctly after the natural cue, then you would give less help than he needs in order to challenge him to complete the task as independently as possible. Then, you would give increasing amounts of help until he can complete the task correctly. For example, if your child has an objective to say the word 'more', and he usually needs direct verbal help, you might begin with a nonverbal gesture. If he does not respond to the nonverbal gesture, you might increase the amount of help to indirect verbal help such as, "What do you need?" It is important to reward your child when he does something with less help than he needed in the past. This encourages him to do the task independently, without help.

Over time, you reduce the amount of help offered by providing less intense help than was necessary at first. Each time your child performs the task with less help than he received in the past, you should reward him. The Least-to-Most help strategy is useful for tasks that are simple or familiar to your child or if you have observed that he can complete a task, but he doesn't do so without prompts or doesn't do so every time.

Examples of Least to Most Help

Time to Stop and Think

Can you describe the least-to-most help strategy and how it was used in the examples?

If you would like to increase your understanding of Least-to-Most help strategies, you can review the following suggested activities

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES

Role-play a least-to-most help strategy with a partner pretending to be your child.

Write down some of the skills your child needs to learn, pick one and make a plan to use a least-to-most help strategy to assist your child in learning that skill.

Think about how, over time, a least-to-most help strategy could be used with the following children