September 9, 2020

Over the years, Robert and I used many workbooks with titles that began with “no-glamour” (yes, with lower case letters) . They were published by Linguisystems, the company, not  long ago, acquired by Pro-ed. A few weeks ago, we started working with No-Glamour Following Directions and No- Glamour Grammar.  Although neither book presented anything new for Robert, he still experienced difficulties in following some of the directions.

1. Robert completed many exercises in No-Glamour Grammar  all by himself. He didn’t even insist that I sit next to him when he was writing the missing words or circling the appropriate ones. He felt sufficiently confident, to proceed without my directions or emotional support. He was proud of his knowledge and abilities. I was proud of him too. He needed suggestions, however, when he had to write sentences (or parts of them – subject or predicate ) based on ideas from his own head. Robert experiences, his observations, his actions, his feelings do not change into language without additional cues. So, the most important part of our session was to create sentences that would use a proper word or proper form of the word, I wanted each sentence to relate to Robert;s experiences, possibly the most recent. For instance, Robert had to write a sentence with the past tense of “ride”. He knew it was “rode” but he didn’t know how to use it in the sentence. Thus I asked him, what he usually rides.  he answered, “bike, horse” Now he was ready to say, “I rode a bike”  The I would ask either where he rode the bike (to the beach) or with whom he rode a bike (with dad and Amanda).  He sometimes chose one and sometimes both phrases to finish the sentence.
2. In  No-Glamour Following Directions, Robert, without any errors, completed those tasks that were self explanatory like connecting two pictures that were in some way related to each other. An object and its category (car and vehicles) , an object and its part (a cup and its handle) objects use together (pen and paper).  He had more trouble with the task that relied heavily on the words, specially pronouns. I wrote about that in https://krymarh.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/pictures-and-words/.  as I observed Robert to either quickly connecting the pictures, hesitating, or making mistakes while responding to verbal directions, I, once again, became convinced that many words which were supposed to help Robert  navigate the world, are confusing him instead.

Not sure yet, how to address Robert’s problem with language. Meantime, however, we will continue with both No Glamour book