Letters

Since we’re still in a post-holiday funk around here and about as lively as the furniture, I’m doing a little content recycling today from a recent comment I made to at least get back to posting. I think all the endless eating and football-watching has killed off a bunch of my brain cells!

Over the last few days, we’ve learned some interesting insights into how to get the J-Man to use some more speech. He is more and more able to give us some idea of how much he understands us and is trying to communicate back to us using a combination of word and syllable approximations as part of what I’m calling ’syllable-by-syllable communication’.

‘Syllable-by-syllable communication’ (my made-up term) has turned into a real winner around here once we pushed him toward it. With this, he communicates one syllable of a word using his best approximation, then we repeat it back to him indicating that we heard and understood him, then he continues with his best approximation of the next syllable, and so on. Following this approach, we’ve gotten through entire sentences, stories, etc. But most of all, we’ve been able to differentiate many words for the first time.

For example, any word that started with ‘m’ used to be ‘muh-muh’ or ‘mo-mo’ or something like that, and he wouldn’t go any further, or we didn’t push him enough to fill in more of the syllables. Now, for example, ‘monkey’ goes like this:

[Note - he tends to get a smidge echolalic with syllables.]

J - “Muh-muh”
Me - “Mon”
J - “kee-kuh”
Me - “key!”

And ‘many’ might go like (with J-Man and I alternating): “Meh-muh”; “Meh”; “Nee-nee”; “Nee!”

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We had our end-of-quarter Parent/Teacher Conference yesterday, and we all celebrated how great the J-Man is doing in school.

Since IEPs are all about annual, specific, measurable goals, these four-times-yearly conferences with the teacher are about seeing how he’s meeting the measurements established by those goals. This allows you to make mid-course corrections as needed, argue for more services if your child is way behind on meeting their goals, etc.

It also allows you dedicated time with the teacher to learn all the ways you can supplement your kid’s learning at home. Of course, we’re always working on that with the teacher, but since these meetings occur at the end of the quarter and in year-round school the end of the quarter means three weeks out of school, this is about coming up with strategies to keep the learning going during the break. Combined with the holiday, we actually have 5 1/2 weeks off starting Monday. Yikes!

The classroom he’s in is about way, way more than just the goals on the page, of course, but the IEP is both a good instrument for measuring progress and one of the most important ways of showing what sorts of services and classroom your child needs from year-to-year.

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To preview what Goosie Cards are, visit their web site at GoosieCards.com.

As we’ve chronicled in recent posts (see “My God, He IS Reading!”, “Roy G. Biv”), our son is all about his flash cards lately. They’re not going to displace the Sacred Wooden Letter Blocks of Steadfast Security and Comfort anytime soon, but flash cards are a cornerstone of many of his most important learning activities.

We recently discovered that – at age 3! – he can read many sight word cards (see above posts and “The $64,000 Question…” - and note that he’s trying to read people’s t-shirts now), so Mary and I are all about finding as many different kinds of cards as we can to build on these wonderful skills he’s suddenly developed.

So, in what proved to be a timely e-mail, I was contacted by Tom Stein, COO of Goosie Cards, who asked if I would be interested in trying out some of their cards and reviewing them. This was right up our alley and a great opportunity to try something new with the J-Man, so of course I agreed.

I looked at their web site before the cards arrived and was immediately intrigued (go look now if you haven’t already) but you can’t really appreciate what you’re getting until you hold a Goosie Card in your hand. Once you do, you know immediately that these are light-years beyond the flash cards you get at the store.

Goosie Card (left) next to other flash cards of two other brands.

The cards are practically bomb-proof. The card stock and lamination are of a quality, thickness, and durability unparalleled by anything I’ve ever seen. I think the only way to make them more durable would be to manufacture them out of slate or paving stone. While nothing is technically indestructible in the hands of a toddler, I don’t know whether anyone - child or adult - could put even a nick on them without using scissors or a hacksaw.

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There is that in me - I do not know what it is - but I know it is in me.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

- Selections from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman

Time and again, I’ve encouraged everyone whose child is significantly developmentally delayed to take all their “What Your Child Should be Doing at 142.234505 Weeks” books and chuck them out the window. Don’t even give them to other parents. If you feel guilty about this, recycle them and be good to the earth or something. Personally, I think it’s best to get an oil drum, throw all of them in along with pictures of Dr. Spock and Butthead Bettelheim, and set the whole damn thing on fire.

Still, with our revelation that J-Man is recognizing printed words (typing ‘reading’ is still hard to get used to!), it did get us wondering, Is it ‘normal’ for your average 3.3-year-old child to be doing this? His teacher gave a succinct reply, “Um, no.”

The thing is, I have absolutely no context for what ‘typically developing’ children do anymore.

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[Another event so good it requires two posts!]

We celebrate our 200th post with a monumental achievement by the J-Man. Even though we were quite skeptical before, he really IS reading words!!

We pulled out these ’sight words’ cards we have, which are basically just flash cards with one word per card and nothing else (no pictures, etc. that might give the kid hints). All we did was hold up the cards one at a time and say “What is this?” or “What word is this?” None of that “point to red” or similar kinds of exercises we’ve done before.

And by God, he read them - a lot of them.

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[Another event so good it requires two posts!]

So this morning, the J-man and I are hanging out downstairs, when he goes into the other room, and brings me a set of flashcards, still in the box. Yes, we have many sets of flashcards! On the front of the box was a representation of one of the cards - it had the word WHITE on it, and a picture of a white horse (yeah, I thought they could have come up with something better too).

J-man shows the box to me, then says, “whhhhhiii.”
Me: um, what?
J-man: “whhhhiii”

Me: thinking - did he just read that word?

I get out the actual flashcards, and they are pretty cool - the word on one side, and the picture on the other. I hold up the RED card.
J-man: “eerrrrr”
Me: that’s right! Red!
I hold up the BLUE card.
J-man: “mmmmmbbbbb” (which is as close to the B sound as he can get)
Me: that’s right! Blue!
I hold up the YELLOW card.
J-man: “yyeeehhh”
Me: that’s right! Yellow!
I hold up the GREEN card.
J-man: “gggeeee”
Me: that’s right! Green!

I pick up the little man, run him upstairs, and wake Tim with the news that his son can well and truly read.

He also knows brown, purple, and pink. I listened to him sound out “so” - sssss ooooo. He can read so many words, and we didn’t know!

My kid is brilliant!

Now I’ll be the first to admit that something this significant requires equally significant evidence to convince me this is really happening, but there’s at least something interesting going on here.

J-Man has a picture book - one of those baby-oriented ones with one picture per page. Over time, he’s enjoyed looking at these sorts of books off and on, though not much lately and not really taking any initiative to point out pictures and tell us about them. A couple of days ago, though, he picked up an old favorite that’s been ignored for many months and started telling us about the pictures, which of course we think is great. Then we noticed something he’s never done before.

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The Croup has landed on the Flashlight house. Man I was starting to feel bored, lazy, and complacent so it’s a good thing this happened! Feel the sarcasm oozing from every pore!

And even better is that there really isn’t a dang thing you can do about croup except maybe crank up some humidifiers. And at this point if it could possibly work, we’re all about it. We obviously need a bigger humidifier for the downstairs so he can be more comfortable during the day. So we may be off to Bed, Bath, and Boogaloo tomorrow with our fistful of 20% off coupons to buy more. Given all the coupons they send us, we should get a humidifier for 246% off.

What was amusing is that in the midst of all this misery, J-Man actually had a really good speech day. In the doctor’s office, we sang the ABC song, and he did a great job getting most of the letters out pretty clearly, even while talking through a snotty nose.

In more talking news, I’m still diggin’ that he calls me Daddy consistently now. It never gets old after over three years without the ‘d’ sound in the house. He says it in a few ways with “dah-dee” or “duh-dee” being the most common, and with the last “dee” becoming “die” on occasion. Sometimes it comes out “dah-zee”, I think because the ’s’ and ‘z’ sounds just showed up recently, and he seems to be enjoying trying them out.

Of course today being what it was, a couple of times what I assume was “Daddy” came out as “die-die”, which was a pretty fitting description of the day.

We took today off from school and had a day of rest, though I personally could have rested better on my own. We also have tomorrow off because of Veterans Day. I hope to God he’s better by Wednesday. Missing too much school throws everybody off, including the students in the class who seem very aware when one of their number is gone a while. The Autistic Gang of Five that make up his class are getting thick as thieves, so being down a man or two definitely impacts the havoc they can wreak!

I’m one of the first people to encourage other parents to chuck the milestones books out the window. The ones that tell you what your child should be doing at 75.34 weeks to me do little except make you increase your antacid budget every month. The obvious exception to this is that if you suspect that your child is very delayed in one or more areas, go figure that out both through reading and with your pediatrician and other professionals. There’s a big difference between being 1.8 weeks behind and 18 months behind.

This is probably a blinding flash of the obvious for parents of kids with delays, but after a few months in Early Intervention and therapies and whatnot, you completely lose touch with what ‘developmentally normal’ is. It really is a time warp. At this point, I would have a hard time telling you how far behind our son is. We’re doing things on J-Man Daylight Time and ignoring how most of the rest of the planet tells time. He’ll do it when he does it, has become our motto (at least on our good days).

With J-Man showing some exceptional skills in some areas in the midst of being very delayed on most everything else, we’ve felt the need to go back and figure out what ‘normal’ is for an almost-three-year-old. At a parenting level, I’m not sure how much I’m concerned about this at this point. Like I said, he’ll get there when he gets there, at least I keep telling myself that. However, for purposes of getting him into preschool and doing his IEP, we need to get some handle on where he is (that Present Levels of Performance thing - with the wonderful acronym PLOP).

It’s hard to find to milestones charts that translate well into autism-ese. The obvious problem is that your autistic toddler could easily be two or more years plus or minus what is developmentally ‘normal’ for a three-year-old on these charts. He or she will likely be scattered all over the chart. You have to transpose quite a bit with them, but after thinking through it a bit, I still could get a rough idea.

At the bottom of this post are some links I found to help us get started. Hopefully they’re useful to you as well. I can’t vouch for their complete accuracy or anything, but they’re consistent enough with each other for what I was looking for.

I did discover that J-Man’s letter identification is probably on par with a level of 4-5 years old (he’ll be 3 in a couple of months if you just got here), just minus the ability to say some of them. If he’s in a relaxed state, he can point to any letter you ask for. Lowercase still confuses him for a good half of the letters, but that’s understandable. He’s getting there with numbers and has consistently identified five colors (again, when he’s in a relaxed state). With colors, I usually give him three to choose from (solid-color, construction paper squares) and ask him to point to ‘red’ or whatever. If he goes 10/10, he’ll get the proverbial gold star and we’ll start trying to identify colors in other contexts.

[Worth nothing that if you say something like "point to the green frog" he just stares at the floor. Combining a color and an object - 'green frog' - is too much to sort through as he has to figure out what's green and what's a frog at the same time. So, we just do "point to green" at this point.]

The key is the ‘relaxed state’. If he’s calm, he can do this stuff one to two years beyond age level. Otherwise, it’s a lost cause. Hitting that sweet spot is hard, which is as much the battle as anything. This is totally a sensory processing issue, which we’re working on constantly.

OK, enough of my rambling on. Here are the links I stumbled on. These center on speech, language, and literacy milestones. If you know of others, let us know.

http://www.capitolent.net/speech-milestones.htm

http://www.horizonspeechcenter.com/milestones.html

http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/tnl/lilm/early_literacy/preschool/milestones3-5.html

http://www.childcarelounge.com/articles/xlearningleteracy.htm