Dr. Seuss’s Birthday! B, B, B!
We’d be seriously remiss if we didn’t mention that today is the birthday of the great Dr. Seuss. We feel forever in his debt because books like the ABC book, There’s a Wocket in My Pocket, Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? were some of the most essential pieces of the J-Man’s early learning. We found them indispensable in motivating him in his speech and reading work. Many of his early sounds and very likely much of his early reading skills and knowledge of the alphabet came from these Seuss books.
I have the ABC book memorized still. I spent many a day calming him down by reciting it and little by little letting him try to fill in a sound or word whenever I paused. After a long while, we could do the whole thing together. He’d say the next syllable, and then I’d say it, all the way through. We could do this without the book, both of us repeating it from memory like a liturgy. Really, that’s pretty much what it was for us.
So, Theodor Geisel, we thank you and honor you for everything you mean to our family and millions of others around the world.
by Tim on October 2, 2009
My health has just been for crap lately, so crawling out from under my self-pity and general groaning – which I’m not good at in general – has required some serious conscious effort on my part.
Thankfully, the J-Man has his ways of snapping me out of it with yet more astonishing new things he’s achieved lately. His last two weeks at school this quarter – which ended a week ago – were like a quantum leap forward for him. His progress at school has been extraordinary, and it seems like every day at home yet another new beam of light comes shining out from him.
As I noted one of today’s great achievements, I got to thinking about all his recent accomplishments and newly-developed skills. I decided to start trying to write them down so I could both celebrate them and snap myself out of my self-indulgent funk. So, here are a handful.
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In our last IEP goals recap from last quarter, the J-Man had a great nine weeks overall and showed great gains. This past quarter just ended last Thursday, and our little superstar continues to make great strides toward what we thought were some pretty ambitious goals for this year.
As a refresher for those curious about how we do things around here, the quarterly evaluations are done based on how well the kids are progressing toward meeting their IEP goals for the entire year, and then they’re assigned an evaluation code based on the following scale:
1 – Insufficient progress to meet IEP goal by end of year; below expected mastery of goal at this point in the year
2- Skills are emerging; mastery of goal is still inconsistent; student needs support to meet goals
3 – Consistent progress toward goals; on track to meet annual goal
3* – Consistent progress toward goals + some evidence of application and independence (Not sure why they need another 3 score here, but whatever. “Application and independence” are definitely two words we like.)
4 – Annual goal has been mastered; able to generalize the skill independently in multiple settings.
As I mentioned last time, don’t ask me why they felt the need to add a 3* in between 3 and 4 rather than just fix the scale to begin with. But anyway…
We rounded the halfway mark of this year early in March, so in light of that, his progress toward goals he has a few more months to meet is awesome.
Here are those categories and all the great stuff he’s been up to lately.
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Tim had asked me to put together a list of my favorite blogs. I think he was surprised that none of the ones I call “my absolute favorites” were blogs about autism.
I thought about why. I think for me, blogs are another form of escapism. I read blogs for fun, and often laugh out loud as I read them. As you are probably aware, Tim does most of the research on autism in our family. He reads the books. He reads the blogs. He watches the news pieces.
I can’t do that. I think it’s because there is so often something in there that hurts me – it hurts my soul. To see children (or adults for that matter) treated in the way that so many news articles report… it hurts me. Before we had the J-man, I would see stories about a child dying, or being hurt, or something horrible, and think, “That’s awful. I can’t imagine what those parents are going through.”
The problem of course now is that I CAN imagine what those parents are going through, at least to the extent that I can imagine that happening to MY child. I read about the bullying by peers and by teachers going on in schools. I know that doesn’t happen to our son right now (self-contained AU classroom, awesome teachers, and “special helpers” from the 5th grade class), but I can imagine it happening some day.
So there are some autism blogs that I read daily. And others… that I have to work up the courage to read. And others… that I just can’t read at all.
Theodor Seuss Geisel – better known to the world as Dr. Seuss – was born March 2, 1904. To say that Geisel has had a powerful influence on generations of children – many of us now adults – is a vast understatement.
For me, and I imagine for many parents, it’s wonderful to be able to read to my son the same Dr. Seuss books I loved as a child. He loves them so much that I have a handful of them memorized so I can tell him those stories when we don’t have the books with us. Having his lyric words in my head whenever I need them has been a gift to me, too. I catch myself reciting them even without the J-Man around and feel better for it.
It’s a dream of most anyone who puts pen to paper and writes that we might be able to do even a small fraction of what Dr. Seuss did. The gifts he left us will endure forever.
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by Tim on January 14, 2009
Because 99% of the stuff in a toy store isn’t really made with the learning needs of autistic children in mind (not likely gonna see “For reading levels 6 and up and speech levels 1 and up!” on a toy) and because there’s no telling what the J-Man will play with and what he won’t, I’ve started making ‘folder games’.
These are just very cheap learning games made from manila folders, velcro dots, and other stuff that you can for the most part find around the house, or for almost no cost at the store. And when you’re done with them, you can just fold them up and slide them on a shelf.
The ones I’ve made lately center on matching words with objects (e.g. a square of one color, then he puts the word under it – or vice-versa) with some number and letter matching thrown in too. This seems like a big leap in mental effort for him, so his attention span is lower. But that’s just how he normally is with newer challenges, so it’s nothing unusual. He perseveres and soon amazes us with the things he can learn.
So I’d like to show you three examples of these folder games. I think the entire cost for these three activities took less than $2 out of the supply budget plus the time it took us to make them. And as a bonus, the folders themselves are reusable for countless other activities I haven’t finished yet.
This is just a manila folder with eight velcro dots stuck in it – four for the color squares, which are made from construction paper – and four for the label strips, which I printed off my computer as sheets of about 20 words each and then cut them out. All of these things are laminated with matching velcro dots on the back so they’ll stick to the folder.
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