Our Mission: Working with You
Welcome to Unspoken Thoughts, LLC
We are a small business located in Vienna, VA, that provides individuals with motor impairments, limited functional speech, and autism the opportunity to access appropriate education while gaining meaningful independence and autonomy.
Whether a student is at a public, private, or home school setting, we assess a student's current ability to learn and demonstrate their understanding. Then, we set incremental goals to increase learning tolerance, ability to purposefully respond, and communication complexity.
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For students with motor impairments, limited functional speech, and autism, developing the skills for reliable communication is crucial to helping individuals discern and mitigate the frustrations associated with a disability. We believe that all individuals have a basic right to meaningful communication.
What skills do we work on?
For Communication:
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Sensory Tolerance/Regulation
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Purposeful Movement
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Fluency on Letterboard
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Self-Commands and Self-Initiation
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Handwriting
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Independent Typing/Spelling
For Advanced Motor Skills:
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Hobbies
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Painting/Art
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Board Games
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Texting/Social Media
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Music/Piano
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Self-Care Tasks
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Using Technology
For Greater Life Skills:
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Daily Routines
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Cooking/Cleaning
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Purposeful Shopping
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Budgeting
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Community-Building
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Social Gatherings
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Accessible Employment
How do we achieve this?
You can learn more about us and our services on the What We Do page, but we provide a variety of services to achieve these goals, and for clients of a wide range of ages. Most students start with a one-on-one sessions, and your intake provider will help you make an individualized plan for achieving greater communication skills and autonomy.
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At Unspoken Thoughts, we use a teaching method called RPM, which was developed by Soma Mukhopadhyay to work with her own son, Tito, who is autistic. RPM is most often associated with letterboards, which students use to point to individual letters and spell out their thoughts, but the true method involves much more than holding a letterboard. With RPM, we identify learning channels (auditory, visual, tactile, kinesthetic) students are able to reliably access and process, focusing our attention on strengthening those channels while integrating the others. We break through sensory, regulation, and initiation challenges our students face via motor modeling, prompting, and lessons designed to help students develop meaningful communication. Students first starting with us may rely heavily on these supports, but over time are able to fade that support to achieve greater levels of autonomy.
Unspoken Thoughts gave my son a voice when he needed to communicate. We now have a different relationship with him with the board, and he grows stronger every day with this communication.
Shannon and her staff are fantastic. Well trained, professional, kind, inspiring and are changing lives daily! So grateful to have found them!
Shannon and her team are unquestionably the finest in the region for taking on the challenge of teaching communication skills to children and young adults on the spectrum.
The talented and compassionate teachers at Unspoken Thoughts have opened up the world to my daughter in a way she would not have experienced otherwise. I don't know what we would do without them. They are incredible.