Reading

Fun With Folder Games!

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, [...]

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Climbing Up the IEP Goals Ladder – “What a Great Quarter!” Edition

December 17, 2008

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, [...]

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Parent-Teacher Conference

December 17, 2008

Didn’t those words strike fear into your heart as a kid? Even when you KNEW you had been pretty much perfect the entire year? And that you were already making straight As in everything? Yeah… it’s worse for the parent. Maybe especially for the parents of a special needs child. We knew how awesome the [...]

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The $64,000 Question – Is He (Dare We Say It) Reading?

November 17, 2008

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 [...]

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Daddies, Mouses, Social Interaction, and a Dash of Zorro!

November 1, 2008

One of J-Man’s favorite words lately is ‘mouse’ (mow-muh – as in ‘ow’ not a long ‘o’), thanks to the new Best Book in the Universe (TM), The Napping House, which he has completely memorized. We read it before his bath, and he could pretty much recite the whole thing to me at this point [...]

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Building Blocks, Sequences, Memory, and Thoughts on Thinking

October 14, 2008

You may already know that it’s pretty common for autistic kids to line up, group, stack, or otherwise organize things in their environment. Order can be a very helpful way of making sense of their surroundings and feeling more comfortable in it. J-Man on the whole hasn’t seemed particularly concerned about this, though. Our house [...]

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Revisiting Milestones – Speech, Language, and Reading

July 23, 2008

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 [...]

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Ups and Downs

May 27, 2008

The J-man is having one of those days. OK, maybe one of those weeks. He does brilliantly at some things (see also: the typing thing!), and then completely loses it with others (see also: speech therapy today. Whew!). I don’t know if he’s still just off his game from being at the grandparents for the [...]

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