And now something that should make upcoming evaluations even more interesting…
Apparently, J-Man can identify a handful of colors too. One of our new learning-at-home activities is to do “Point to ____” and give him multiple choices, then repeat that 10 times. We’ve started keeping a notebook and recording how he does.
His progress at identifying letters has improved astronomically. Presented with three choices, he got 30 in a row correct. (Correct = pointed to the correct letter. If it’s one he could say, he almost always said it too.) Let that sink in a second, then keep going.
Each time I would remove the flash cards from his sight, jumble them up, put them back in front of him, and repeat. I would swap in different letters (we didn’t use the same three 30 times or anything) and ask him to identify different letters (didn’t ask him to pick ‘J’ each time, for example, probably did 10 different letters by the end). He still got 30 in a row right. He might have kept the streak going but he declared he was done by getting up and running away.
We haven’t really practiced numbers much, but for giggles we tried that today more formally for the first time. He was fixated on the ‘8′ so I had a hard time getting him to play along, but he did get 4 out of 5 right before taking the ‘8′ card and wandering off.
Interesting tidbit – he still won’t do this with objects. Give him the choice between a book and a ball, ask him to point to the book – more often than not, nada.
So, of course, what’s the next thing to try? Colors!
I started with two choices – green and red. I asked him for green 5 times and red 5 times. (I know that’s not exactly orthodox method, but I was experimenting.) Each time I removed the cards (solid, one-color, construction paper squares we laminated) from his sight and brought them back, trying to randomize the order as best you can with two cards. He didn’t do so hot. Just 4/10. At first, everything he choose was the card on his right. Toward the end, he kept picking green regardless of what I asked for. Was this confusion or him being a stinker (he had that look on his face). Who knows? I made my notes and tried again.
This time I did red and yellow 10 times and asked him to pick yellow each time. Same deal – put the cards in front of him, asked him to point to yellow, took the cards away, brought them back, tried to randomize the order. He picked yellow 10 times out of 10 and never hesitated once in picking it. Dude.
So I tried again with blue and green, asking for green 10 times. Same process as before. He picked green six times (once with his foot), both of them three times (once with both feet), and refused to pick one time. His accuracy went downhill fast; most of what he got correct was toward the beginning. This was an indicator that he was really tired of this game. Still being ticked off and getting 6/10 wasn’t bad.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this, and still won’t until we do colors some more. While I was pondering this, he grabbed the yellow square some time later and said ‘ell-oh’, which totally wigged me out.
Actually there was one more thing to try. His new developmental therapist asked me whether he could identify letters within words (like the ‘a’ in ‘balloon’). I didn’t know. Great question. I hadn’t really tried it. So I tried a couple. We did the ‘e’ in ’sheriff’ (it’s on a little mat in his classroom) and the ‘o’ in ‘cow’ on a flash card. It took him a while, but he did it. Clearly that was a lot harder for him, and I couldn’t really hold his attention to it for more than those two words. Still, darn impressive.
Before I get effusively proud in this post (which I am), I’ll move on. All this got me thinking about future evals. Apparently some of these newly-discovered abilities could be 1-2 years developmentally AHEAD of where he is age-wise, depending on how far and deep and consistent they are. It’s really hard to tell right now as we don’t honestly know what’s going on in his toddler brain, what he’s understanding, and what he’s trying to communicate – problems we’ve had for forever. All that while some of his abilities are pretty clearly 1 to maybe 2 years behind. As long as the schools don’t average all that out and get “he’s functioning at age level”, we’ll be fine. But it should make for some interesting scoring and reporting for the upcoming IEP.
Our speech therapist is going to do another eval of him of her own next week and tell us what she thinks about where he is communication-wise. Her informal opinion at this point is on the order of astonishment. Apparently, this isn’t a situation that happens often at all. A county evaluator who didn’t know him and all this stuff he’s been showing would get a very different picture over the course of the whole, whopping hour they can spend with kids. Since our speech therapist has worked with him for months, hopefully she can give a more accurate picture. We’ll see what that yields. I’m not sure how you decipher the kind of puzzle this is turning into.
Let’s just say, things have gotten a lot more interesting around here. Every day is an even bigger revelation than it was, and that’s saying something.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Our kids are sounding more and more similar. E could identify numbers by 20 months, and picked up colors and shapes sometime between 2-3. All this while still struggling to put two words together!
@magicdrgn – that’s exactly the kind of thing that fascinates me to no end. I have no idea how these things work, but there they are.
So I have to ask the obvious question – what techniques did you use to figure out what he does know? Flash cards have worked well so far. We made color squares by laminating bits of construction paper. I even picked up some sight-word flash cards today to try out next week. This works well for the ‘point-and-pick’ method, but I have no clue how to access how much in the way of abstract thinking he has. For that matter, I’m not sure how he processes and comprehends what he is seeing.
For example, show him a black O on white paper, and he can name it immediately. If you have Sandra Boynton’s “A to Z” book, open it up and look at the O. It’s an O where the middle is an open door with an owl looking out of it. You can look at him and tell this bakes his noodle. It’s like he knows it’s an O but it defies any concept of what he understands as O. You can just watch his mental gears turning trying to incorporate it into his brain.
Give him very literal and very concrete things – like big, black letters or numbers on white paper or solid color squares with no detail – and he’s really picking that up. A more abstract concept like “things with pages are often books, and books are things we read” doesn’t seem to compute with him at all when you show him a picture of a book. You hand him the exact, physical book he wants, and he understands he wants to read that particular book. To get him to equate pointing to a picture of a generic book to something like “I want to read” feels on par at this point like asking him the best route to Mars. Maybe he does understand to some degree, but I get a lot of blank looks back, and that often means we’re not on the path he’s working to communicate on.
Trying to find any way at all to communicate things involving feelings or senses like “my head hurts” or “my tummy hurts” or “I’m hot” has largely gone nowhere. We can intuit a lot of things just by being around him all the time, but days like today illustrate just how far we have to go yet.
J-Man is clearly not feeling that great. We suspect it’s his tummy, but it’s just an educated guess. He woke up way too early today and collapsed for a short power nap later (since he doesn’t nap anymore, that’s a sign in and of itself), then woke up from that pretty cranky. He came downstairs and snuggled up beside me on the floor and didn’t move for about 20 minutes. I can’t remember the last time he did this with me that didn’t involve several consecutive occurrences of vomit. Thankfully, no chunks this time. But he still moaned and whined a lot and generally looked miserable.
This is where the lack of communication is so hard. We have no way of understanding how to help him when he get stuck like this. Sure we can comfort him, but if it’s a physical ailment, there are things we could try to help if we could better understand what’s going on.
Unfortunately, there’s no picture system we can use for “my tummy hurts”, at least not one he would use yet. We’re still several steps behind there.
That’s a rambling way to come back to your original point. 1) How do you keep digging to see how much they really do know, and 2) how might you leverage what they do know into getting communication about other things like feelings and physical pains?
(Remember that in our case, sign language isn’t an alternative. He just doesn’t seem to have the motor skills to do it, for whatever reason, after almost two years of trying. )
Thanks for your comment. You’ve already plowed some of this ground ahead of us, so we’d love to hear more about what you tried and what worked for E.
Finding out what E knew in terms of numbers, colors, etc. was pretty easy, because he would label everything. He started by saying the floor numbers as the elevator went up in our building, and then started pointing out and labeling some foam numbers that we had in the bathtub. Then he went through a phase where he was labeling colors all the time, then moved on to shapes. He surprised his speech therapist the other day by correctly labeling a pentagon! Hasn’t shown much interest in letters yet, though. Unfortunately, apart from saying “I’m hungry” a few times, he’s shown very little inclination to express any internal state, either physical or emotional. We’re pretty much in the same place you are with J when he’s sick, just trying to make educated guesses about what hurts.
Oops. Realized I missed your comment! My bad. It’s been that kind of week.
That’s awesome about him labeling things. It would be great if we could all move some from the more concrete into the more abstract, but I guess we have to start somewhere and look for what works best in our respective puzzles.
For us the excitement lately has been in just becoming aware of how much he knows and understands – something that was a big question mark until recently. We have come to appreciate just how wonderfully complex he is. The harder part will be in helping him learn to express himself in all the abstract stuff of life. One thing at a time, though.
I keep thinking there’s something like a cryptography key that will unlock all this, but I know better. It’s slow, hard work, but these are the literal building blocks for going forward.
Either way, our kids really are sounding eerily similar.
when we goto a restaurant by mistake(with her noise issues we never do this ,hence mistake)i have tried giving her the menu card she too pints out a, o,u k, r etcetc..her fav is W(dubyu)it occupies her for few minutes …
We’re pretty much of the ‘do whatever it takes to amuse him’ school of thought when we go to restaurants. We went to an Indian restaurant last night and while he fidgeted a lot and tended to want to make his stuffed animals part of our meal (not pretend eating but trying to put them on the table and on our plates), he did pretty well. It was just nice to eat out for a change!
Sorry it’s still hard for you all to go out to eat. I hope it does get better, and I think it will in time. The big plus about the Indian restaurant we went to was that it has soft lighting, very calm and not loud music playing, the waitstaff is very nice, and the people in the restaurant weren’t loud either. Plus the food is amazing.
It was so nice to be out in a restaurant.