Gemiini QuickStart Skills Guide
This week's post explores Gemiini's QuickStart Skills library. Read on to learn about the different Skills categories and to discover how your students can benefit from the pre-made videos in this library.
What is QuickStart Skills?
QuickStart Skills is a collection of pre-made videos targeting skills related to verbal communication, self-reliance, health and hygiene, behavior strategies, peer interaction, and social skills. Videos from QuickStart Skills are designed to supplement the Language Pyramid curriculum. Gemiini members can assign videos from the Skills library according to their own assessment of their student's needs. This guide describes what you'll find in each category of QuickStart Skills and will help you decide which videos could benefit your student.
Attending Skills
Attending Skills include an individual's ability to concentrate, listen, observe, and respond. These skills are important for successful engagement with people, tasks, and activities. If your student does not pay attention during Gemiini viewing sessions, our Attending Skills videos can help. You can repeat the interactions modeled in these videos to practice attending skills with your student at home. As students learn to attend, you should notice their engagement increase during all kinds of activities.
Visual & Spatial
We use Visual & Spatial skills to interpret and interact with what we see. Matching, recognizing patterns, solving puzzles, and sorting items all involve visual and spatial skills. Gemiini's Visual & Spatial videos can help learners who struggle with these activities. These videos provide teaching examples for matching objects and pictures, recognizing and repeating visual patterns, sorting items by function, feature, or category, and sequencing pictures of events. For additional practice, you can generalize activities modeled in these videos with your learner at home.
Receptive Language
Receptive Language refers to our ability to understand the language we hear. Receptive language is typically developed before expressive language, meaning most individuals can understand some language before they produce their own speech. Our Receptive Language videos bolster receptive language development by modeling different activities where children follow directions to correctly identify objects, emotions, and actions by name, category, or description. Students' receptive language will improve as they progress through the Language Pyramid. Viewing videos from the Receptive Language library can be an effective way to augment Language Pyramid assignments.
Motor Imitation Skills
Motor Imitation Skills are an individual's ability to copy actions. Practicing motor imitation improves cognition and motor planning, boosts attending skills, and promotes speech development. These videos model imitation interactions between a child and adult. Imitation is learned in Level 1 of the Language Pyramid. Videos from Motor Imitation Skills can supplement assignments for students who are working at this level, or for any students who are practicing imitation.
Vocal Imitation Skills
The videos in Vocal Imitation Skills can improve your student's ability to imitate speech. Vocal imitation is an important skill in early language development. It is a primary focus of the early levels of the Language Pyramid. These videos target a wide range of vocal imitation skills, from imitating single syllables to imitating words and sentences. You will also find videos that model mimicking the speed, volume, tone, and pitch of vocalizations.
Requesting Skills
Requesting Skills refers to an individual's ability to have their needs met. This includes requesting items, asking for help, requesting the removal of a stimulus, and requesting actions. Learning to request is the beginning of initiating verbal interactions with others. The videos in our Requesting Skills library model these skills for students at all different levels of the Language Pyramid. We offer videos that teach requesting with sign language, requesting with single words, and requesting with full sentences.
Labeling Skills
We use Labeling Skills to name objects or actions and their features, functions, and categories. Our Labeling Skills videos model labeling of common objects, actions, and body parts, labeling with adjectives and other parts of speech, and more. Videos in this category help students develop a strong vocabulary. They can improve receptive language and are appropriate for students working in Level 3 or higher of the Language Pyramid.
Pretend Play
Pretend Play is a healthy part of every child's social, emotional and cognitive development. These videos foster play skills and stimulate imagination. They provide exceptional models of initiating and engaging in appropriate play alone, with peers, and with adults. These clips can be used with students at every level of the Language Pyramid.
Intraverbal & Critical Thinking
Intraverbal behavior refers to an individual's ability to respond appropriately to all kinds of verbal communication. The videos in Intraverbal & Critical Thinking model answering fill-in-the-blank questions, describing details of objects not present, making inferences, and answering wh- questions about people, places, events, and actions. These videos are most beneficial to students working in Level 3 or higher of the Language Pyramid.
Behavior Strategies
The videos in Behavior Strategies are designed to help students with disruptive behaviors. They provide strategies for reducing or eliminating stimming, echolalia, elopement, and inappropriate physical behavior while teaching appropriate behaviors and modeling responses to directive phrases. The Behavior Strategies library is also home to a video teaching the pointing skills students need for Gemiini's testing feature.
Life Skills
Our Life Skills videos promote independence, self-reliance, and general well-being. They model skills like potty training, telling someone when you're hurt, crossing the street safely, making healthy snacks, helping with chores, and interacting with common fasteners. These videos foster life skills for students at every stage of development.
Social Skills
The videos in Social Skills model appropriate interaction and communication with others, both verbally and non-verbally. They build confidence and self-esteem by helping students communicate and relate with their peers. These videos teach skills like asking for help, sharing and turn-taking, understanding simple gestures, and using please, thank you, you're welcome, and excuse me.
Gemiini has tools to help students make progress regardless of their current skill set or ability. Feel free to preview any of the clips in our QuickStart Skills library before assigning them to your student. If you need help choosing the best QuickStart Skills videos for your student, please schedule a call with one of our product specialists. For other questions about using Gemiini, check out our resources page.