Months and Months of organizing, planning, and figuring out why on earth I cannot follow the standard curriculum and special needs programming that they offer at all public schools, and most catholic. Months of reading about amazing naturalistic curriculums, the origins and intentions of various forms of teaching and educating. Catching up on my children's special needs, and requirements for successful integration. Finding myself at wits ends, and off the cliff so many times, balancing my goals with fighting the fears of big changes ahead.
Then today. With such precision and focus. My 6 year old labeled moderately autistic, with severe language and communication delays, and very poor health pulled off a miracle. To me it is. To any science geeks or anonymous autism-sympathizers, it would be as well. He is dedicated to his toys and pretend play; he is very sophisticated. How? he studies, researches, and informs himself from various different perspectives, tools, resources, and continues with an open mind and a desire to share with those close to him, and a need for privacy and security from those who don't see what he has been doing.
1. his favourite theme is superheroes, for so many reasons, some therapeutic (yes deliberately), and others creatively.
2. he has many toys. a homeschooler gets to use many more toys than a daycare-attendee would.
3. he asks for help and support for learning during his play, he has taken VB/ABA and made it his own, child-led initiative to discover himself, and challenge his inner autism and child troubles into submission or creative masterpieces.
4. he has regular access to cartoons, movies, youtube, comic books, books, and parents (who of course have grown up with these same characters, so should be able to provide some insight or vocabulary)
5. he is learning to read, and at the same time his visual processing has developed marvelously through searching on youtube without reading skills, to find the videos that provide the stories, social possibilities, and more that he could be looking for.
6. he returns to his play or will show what he has learned, demonstrations, presentations, discussions, explanations. and the best part, is he is an interactive speaker.
pretend is the ultimate, amazing, autism stim out there.
This morning his drive was to watch Magic School Bus videos about the rain, and plumbing.
'D' has severe communicative delays, a highly developed and trained sense of echolalia, both delayed and immediate. So for him to have questions he cannot find the words for, and then to research it online through videos, which obviously bypasses his very rudimentary reading skills.. is in my opinion. Fantastic.
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