Hi everyone, Great meeting this month! Thanks so much to MaryPat, Debbie, Breena, and Heather for the kids they presented, to Mara for the setup and breakdown and Marit for webmastering! I want to repeat the announcements: The DIR at Home and School webinar was really fun last week - Thanks Chantal for that opportunity - we had people form all over the USA, Canada, and places as far away as Croatia and India. Slides from the presentation are up on our local DIR blog: circlestretch.blogspot.com. I hope that the audiofile an /or the transcript will be available for people to have if they missed it. Rosemary White (DIR OT Faculty in WA) liked it and Serena wans to hear it. My article came out in The Autism File - it's on the shelves at Barnes and Noble now, and follows a preschooler through high school, looking at the DIR model. I'll probably have a companion piece coming out soon on ValeriesList about the boundary issues of parent-professionals. The Wrightslaw confence in February pointed out the requirement for research-based methods in the schools and I want to remond people that there is a 100 years of child development literature and lots of research from supporting fields fo rthe DIR model, as well as studies specifically looking at DIR in its clinical benefits and structural brain changes (normalization). ICDL is actively helping the Lanterman Regional Center develop plans to offer DIR®/Floortime™ services, and the San Mateo Regional Center is using the FEDL from DIR®/Floortime™ to assess clients functional developmental status. There are several training and conference opportunites coming up: The online DIR Basic course is coming up - go to icdl.com for details. This is a great way to learn a lot about DIR®/Floortime™ on your own time (like, say 1:30 am, when things are otherwise quiet). The MIller Method - DIR®/Floortime™ conference will be June 6-7, 2009. Place to be determined but put it on your calendar now. Dr Miller will be coming back to San Diego and he and I will present our models, compare and contrast them, showing video and on day two we will see kids in conference demonstrations of our methods. We want a big turnout, especially since my proceeds go to scholarships for the people going to Asilomar in July. The 10th Annual DIR®/Floortime™ Summer Institute at Asilomar will happen in early July. We have eight students from our local DIR Face to Face tutoring seminar planing to go and I am so proud of their work! The summer institute is an intense training and certification process that brings peole one step closer to certification. DIR certification for clinicans is a long, multi-year process and I am always humbled by the dedication of the people who pursue this important clinical acheivement.
Next academic year we will be offering a DIRB/DRIC1 and probably Floortime Players Institute in Los Angeles as part of a new ICDL Southern Califoria DIRŽ/Floortime™ Institute. This will provide a certification step for about 24 people, and instead of going to a 4-5 day conference somewhere far away it will be a course done over seven Saturdays through the year, all held at Pasadena Child Developement Associates, Dr Diane Cullinanes massive center in the LA area. In future years we hope to expand the training and then create subregions in San Diego and San Luis Obisbo areas. If you are just wanting to hang out and talk with me about living wwith autism or other developmental challenges, I'll be at IEP Dy on May 30, 2009, doing two sections, one specific to autism and the other more general. It was a lot of fun last year and this year I'll be soliciting questions from the floor again and trying not to present too many slides... Finally, our next support group meetings will be on April 1, 2009: the professionals' meeting will be from 9-1030 am with me and the parents' / caregivers' meeting will be form 1030-noon with mara Goverman. Thanks again everyone for making today (yesterday actually) so much fun. Quote for the day: "DIR - Because its fun" See you next month! JF