This one boggled my mind. I’ve always said that one of the most important skills a parent of an autistic child can have is that of pattern recognition. There is usually a reason why your child does something, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that if you study the pattern of what’s going on with and around your child and what they do or create within that, you may begin to figure out the why behind what he or she does. I have slowly developed this skill at least to some degree either through experience, knack, or outright necessity. I was really glad for it today.
Not surprisingly, it’s hard to evaluate the math skills of a non or minimally-verbal autistic child. That difficulty may easily span much further along the spectrum, but I can only speak from our own personal experience. It didn’t dawn on me until the J-Man built the following – and I figured out at least part of what he was doing – that he might be more able to express the math skills he does have visually. I think he gave us his first big clue today that this is indeed a real possibility.
The J-Man constructed the following two towers out of Duplos. He actually built two more along these lines, but I didn’t get pictures of them. See if you see what the relationships are. (Answers included at the end.)
[Hint - We actually found two 'answers' to this first one.]
[Hint - I think there's only one for this one.]
OK. Figured them out yet? Scroll down for what I saw at least. If you see something I didn’t, please post in the comments! And while you’re at it, how do we expand on this discovery?
Tower 1: It’s 9 blocks tall to the top of the shorter side and 9 more blocks up from there to the top of the long side. Also, the color pattern of the first 9 blocks repeats with the last 9. That’s some serious patterning.
Tower 2: The shorter side is 14 blocks tall and then it is 7 more blocks up to the top of the longer side. Nice way of showing how to double a number, show 2/3 and 1/3, or just generally show an appreciation for something like the Rule of Thirds for Lego building. The color pattern this time doesn’t repeat obviously (dawned on me just now that he didn’t have the necessary color blocks to do that if he wanted to). However, it’s possible there is a color pattern to this that I didn’t figure out. That’s happened before.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- “Will be able to match colors in 4 out of 5 observations” – um, check!
- Climbing Up the IEP Goals Ladder – “What a Great Quarter!” Edition
- Shining More and More! Quarterly IEP Report
- All the Good Things
- Interrupting the Loop
- Building Blocks, Sequences, Memory, and Thoughts on Thinking
- Fun With Folder Games!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
So cool! Math skills in pretty colors. I love blocks.
You might want to look into ST math — it’s non-verbal elementary math.
Website
http://www.mindresearch.net/cont/programs/prog_stk5_desc.php
Story
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/education/2009/october/Elementary-Math-Scores-Soar-With-Help-From-Animated-Penguin.html
Wow. Wow! What a little smarty pants! And you totally passed the daddy IQ test for figuring that out.
The first tower – another way to think about it is that the top set of blocks not only repeats the color pattern of the bottom and doubles the height of the tower by number of blocks, it also represents one half the size of the bottom set by size of block (at least that is how it looks in the picture). Go J-man!
@Liz – That ST math site is so neat! I tried the demo and found it rather disorienting at first because I’m so used to doing math as a bunch of written numbers, but once I got my bearings I started to really understand the value of this approach. What a great idea! And I can see why kids love JiJi the penguin! Thanks for giving us the links!
@Julie – You’re right about that. The J-Man almost always builds with wider blocks on the bottom until he’s ‘done’ with them (in whatever he decides ‘done’ is) and moves on to the smaller blocks. The top blocks are usually the ones half the size of these wider, bottom ones.
The few different sizes of Duplos there are lend themselves to this option as often they are either twice or half the size as another type of Duplo either in width or thickness. I hadn’t thought about this doubling occurring not once but twice in that top tower. Thanks!
The more we talk through this, the more I like Duplos as good blocks for math!