All posts in category Teaching Out of Autism

Intensive teaching, not necessary ABA, is what mostly helps my son. Intensive in time, difficulty, scrutiny.Teaching is imposing my way of thinking on my son. I know that. The problem is he cannot teach me, so I have to teach him.

As of Today 3

When I wrote As of Today , I purposefully omitted two subject matters I was helping Robert to learn in the last month.  I believed that they should be treated separately as the idea to work on them came from Robert’s teacher.  This hasn’t been a typical arrangement. The sad thing is that for the most of Robert’s education I, not the school, was a driving force behind teaching Robert something new.

In the last three years, I can point to just one occurrence when I followed the school’s lead. In September/October of 2009 Robert was learning names of the planets in  our solar system. I helped him with that by providing many opportunities for practice. Then, for almost three next years, I didn’t help Robert to learn anything that originated at school.  I tried to help him learn names of all the New England states and their capitals, but I gave up, as learning ordered pairs of information seemed too hard for Robert.  It would be possible but it would take too much time with too small  benefits.  I didn’t even try to help Robert learn names of the bones in the skeleton (also introduced at school), believing that learning just a few of them should suffice. Instead, I have kept on familiarizing  (the process is not finished yet) Robert with names of different internal organs, their functions,  and the systems they are part of.  (I use a model from children’s science kid I bought in Costco and appropriate children’s books.)

For the next three years Robert was learning something at school and learning something else at home.  It would take me a lot of time to explain why the things worked this way, so I skip any details, at least for now.

This year, however, started differently.  I observed Robert’s classroom.  The children were constructing sentences telling what was happening in the pictures.  These first sentences were  followed by  predictions about what would happen next.  For Robert, this  meant practicing a few skills at once.  Skills he hardly had, although I was partially introducing them to Robert over the previous few years. Connecting them together was a next step I had planned to take when, almost two years before, I purchased a set of cards Let’s Predict from Super Duper School Company.

Except, I never took that step.

Despite the appearance of being a  person who pushes and pulls Robert forward I am reluctant to start something new.  I catch myself being unable to imagine how to introduce a set of new concepts and being scared of complications that might appear during the processes of learning and teaching. Self-doubts  are specially strong and consequently damaging because of the prolonged periods of lack of support in this lonely educational pilgrimage.

When I saw the teacher introducing the ask to children, I became calmly inspired.  At home, I took the set of cards out of the drawer and for almost a month Robert was building sentences and making predictions based on two, three, or four pictures from the set.

For Robert, that was a complex assignment: telling what was happening in picture, followed by writing it down, making predictions, and using proper tenses including, just introduced, future tense.  I don’t think I would have a courage to practice all those skills at once had it not been for the teacher whose lesson I observed.

The second subject matter involved order of operation in mathematics.  In the past, Robert practiced with parenthesis,  multiplication, division, addition and subtraction.  Those were usually two, rarely three, simple operations.  But the teacher added second power of the numbers to the set of operations.  I am not sure if I would add counting a square of a number to that set.  But I am glad that the teacher did.  Although counting the value of longer expressions seems not related to narrowly understood “functional” mathematics, for Robert ability  to compute in a right order is a priceless  exercise in working memory, attention, concentration, and planning.  That is why Robert and I spent a lot of time together counting the values of expressions that involved a few math operations. The teacher moved to the next topic, but Robert still finds the values of arithmetic expressions involving parenthesis, squares, multiplications, and other operations.

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by krymarh on October 15, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on October 15, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/10/15/as-of-today-3-2/

Blaming Robert

I will never know exactly what was happening on Robert’s ways to school and back home.  Robert has never told me and, chances are, he never will.  I learned from irate driver that Robert was getting out of his car seat by  unlocking the seat belt. His behavior was  creating dangerous driving conditions.  So dangerous that the transportation company demanded that he wore a  special vest that would keep him seated while in the van. During the three weeks we waited for the vest to  be ordered, I drove Robert to and from the school.

Needless to say, Robert never tried to get out of his seat.

That didn’t surprise me, as it was consistent with Robert’s behavior during our trips to near and far away places.   Robert never unbuckled his seat belt when we were driving to Maine, New Hampshire, New York, or just to the grocery store.

However, when we changed the familiar trip pattern,  Robert became agitated.  For instance, if on a way home,  we had to make a detour,  Robert was energetically moving in his seat back and forth as if he wanted to get out.  Robert accepted any route to a new place, but the way home (and probably to school) was clearly displayed in his mind and any alteration had to be interpreted as  a sign of being lost in space.

Was that the problem with school transportation?

As I was picking Robert from his school van, not once I smelled  freshly made  fries from McDonald or steaming coffee from Dunkin Donuts.  When the driver told me that she shared fries or munchkins with Robert,  I asked her not to do that.  I knew that this might cause problems later as Robert would expect her to continue do the same.

But I didn’t say that she shouldn’t alter Robert’s school route by stopping at McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts.

I am not sure why I didn’t say anything.  Maybe because  I wasn’t really sure what had happened.  Maybe because I didn’t want to impose any additional requirements on the driver and antagonize her.

That was not the first time when I silently accepted the fact that the people around Robert refused to assign any rational explanation to Robert’s behaviors.  I accepted the  fact that nobody analyzed his/her own actions as a factor contributing to the problems Robert had.

It was easy to blame Robert not only because he couldn’t defend himself and explain anything.  It was easy because blaming Robert was really blaming  his autism, and not exactly the person Robert was.  Whatever Robert did in the van, it was because he had autism.  Autism was to blame.  So it was like faulting a person who couldn’t really be blamed because she/he had a good excuse.

Or it seemed so.

I allowed that then and I allowed that during other situations.  For me too,  it was easier to blame autism than to understand the mechanics behind the problems encountered by Robert and people around him.

I have to add, that during one detour on a way from Children’s Hospital, just by constant repeating, “It is a road construction.  We’re taking detour. We are  going home.  It is a detour.  Detour. Road Construction”,  my daughter and I solved the problem for our future trips.  Although, during that ride, Robert’s anxiety didn’t subside as long as we were in unfamiliar territories,  but from that time on, all unexpected turns were tolerated when the magic word “detour” was used.  I could count on this word even when there was no road construction obstructing the street but I wanted to stop somewhere on the way. 

What surprised me then was  the fact that we didn’t go to the Children’s Hospital too often.  Moreover, I didn’t always take the same route home but alternated between two of them, and Robert was fine with whatever choice I made. So I didn’t expect Robert to remember those paths home and yet he did.

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by krymarh on October 12, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on October 12, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/10/12/blaming-robert/

As of Today 2

I have not written for a few weeks.  I have a good excuse.  I was  filling forms for hearing to be held at the  Bureau of Special Educational Appeals.  It was a lot of writing. First, more than 20 pages long draft.  Finally “just” ten pages.  Still a lot.  Even worse, I had to channel my pain and disappointment into calm stream of rational arguments.  That was very hard.  Such exercise can never be fully successful as it is tainted by mixed emotions, suppressed anger, and confusion.  The process, which has hardly even began,  drained me already.  Even worse, my stress  comes up during my daily work with Robert,  showing itself up as flares of impatience.

So, we work less.  I take more breaks.  Still we go on.

So just to keep it down to the earth, I will write about our daily work in the month of September.

We finished reading “More Nonfiction Reading Comprehension Level 3 by Top Readers.  Each day, one short text – one paragraph long. We continued that from the summer when we had completed level 2.  The two levels don’t differ much in the complexities of the texts.  Maybe the vocabulary is slightly more advanced.   As I said before, the texts with pictures are like postcards from all over the world – including its past.  It is as if Robert and I were looking through the window of the moving train noticing changing pictures. Sometimes we  use IPAD to search Internet for additional images. The only effect I am counting on is for Robert to realize how diverse and rich is the world. In a way I am learning that myself.
I think that this might lead Robert to accept more changes, and to better adjust to new situations/places, events  and …. something else I cannot clearly name.

Robert has been working on the first grade level vocabulary workbook by Sylvan Learning.  The purpose is for Robert to independently complete tasks.  I go to the kitchen, while Robert reads and follows simple directions.  Still, when he is not completely sure, he stops and waits for me,  unable to move and risk an error. But he still makes errors. Just this Wednesday he was supposed to circle words representing animals. Two such words were mixed with two other words in each of the four lines.  Robert circled all the animals.  That is great! But he also circled one more word in each line. That word did not name an animal.  For reasons he won’t explain, he assumed that he should circle three words in each line.  He chose two animals and the word he was the least familiar with.

Robert wasn’t really working on First grade vocabulary.  He was learning to trust himself, and believe in his own knowledge.  The first grade vocabulary seemed like a good tool for learning just that.

I make pages with operations on fractions.  Robert still cannot subtract mixed fractions, but he can find the difference between whole number and a mixed fraction.  At the same time, however we work on first and second grade level, so-called,  “word problems”.
It is not getting easier.  Robert learned long ago that “more” means adding, and he cannot understand reasons why expression “how many more” requires subtracting.  I use ideas from very much maligned “Everyday Mathematics”. I draw rectangles that extend each other to represent addition and rectangles placed next to each other to represent subtraction.  I struggle to explain those concepts.  Robert struggles to understand. But those drawing do help…. Well, sort of.

Everyday, we also do a few pages from the No Glamour Grammar workbook from Linguisystems.  We are on page 280 of 400 page book.  There are only few, basic grammar concepts introduced there in a very easy format.  Still, for Robert everything is much more complicated that it seems.  There are pages he can do on his own, almost automatically, and there are pages when we have to work together building sentences.
As we go through those pages Robert practices his short and working memories, learns to connect words to his experiences while building sentences, and, maybe, he also learns grammar. It helps that many of the mechanics Robert knows already.  He knew most of the past tense forms of irregular verb but he still is not sure what verbs are.  To help him find verbs among other words I ask him to choose the word that can finish the sentence: ” I can…”.  To find nouns I want him to finish the sentence “I see…” It is not 100% precise but it will suffice for now.

Still, most of the time we spend on language.  But to describe that I need to write another post, two, or more.

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by krymarh on October 6, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on October 6, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/10/06/as-of-today/

Every Angle of a Word

First thing first.

I started teaching Robert the ordinal numbers more than 12 years ago. My efforts to teach:  first, second, third, and so on coincided with teaching Robert to follow simple directions of the form, “Color the third duck red , Circle the last duck. ” I was introducing, at the same time, directions and ordinal numbers.  It seemed logical to me, and only by observing and analyzing Robert’s struggles,  I realized how difficult it had to be for Robert to respond  to  such directions as “underline, draw a circle above, put a spot on”  when the addition of  “first, second, third” complicated the tasks.

Nonetheless, that was the first time  Robert heard and/or read the word “first”.

Later, Robert encountered the same word again in a different role.  This time word “first ” was organizing events in a timely order.  Robert had to put the events (sentences) from a   story in a sequence of  “first,  next, then, and last”.

I believed that I made a strong connection between the words “first” and “one” .  I believed because, the first character in a line had a   number 1 written on it or below it.

At some point Robert also understood that January is the first month of the year, and knew that Sunday is the first day of the week.

So I was surprised that just a few days ago Robert couldn’t answer the question, ” What day of the week is the first day of February?” He had a page from a calendar spread in front of him.  He could say what day of the week was the fifth day of the month, and 23rd day of the month.  He couldn’t say what week day was the first day of the February.

So the question is,” Does Robert know the concept of the “first”, or he doesn’t?”

I felt the obligation to bring that question up, as it is almost a natural one, the one that expresses some anxiety about what my child knows or does not, but I am not concerned about it myself.  Instead I am troubled by another problem, “How to teach all the angles, meanings, and uses of a new concept/word?”  All at once?  Separately? Spaced by time as not to confuse? In contexts? .  Should I treat the word’s each use as a new concept, or should I present it as a variation of other applications of that word?

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by krymarh on September 20, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on September 20, 2012

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Without Questions

In my previous post  Now You Know It , Now You Don’t I stated that knowing something doesn’t necessary lead to correct answers to the  related questions.  I believe that this is a reason why there is a discrepancy in how parents see their children and how the children are viewed through many formal tests.  Nonetheless, such statement might seem more than controversial. After all,  it is through quizzes, tests, and everyday  serious and trivial inquiries that we determine  what one knows and what one doesn’t know.

When Robert was four years old he had the first neuropsychological evaluation. During the interview I was asked if Robert knows “left” and “right”.  My thoughtless and immediate reply was “Of course not, he cannot talk yet.”  The next question clarified the first one, “Does he put a left shoes on his left foot?”  Yes, he always did.  He never  hesitated.  Even more, Robert experimented with  Ken’s shoes.  He was turning the doll up side down, and backwards  as he was removing and then placing back the shoes on Ken.  Robert was either teaching himself what right and left was or making sure that  it stayed the same, even after the position of the doll changed.

I was confronted with a radical idea that knowledge can be demonstrated without the support of language.

To make matter more complex, there are also  inconsistencies in Robert answering differently structured questions. His responses depend on how the question is worded.

“Is the lemon sweet?”

“Yes.”

“How does the lemon taste?”

“Sour.”

The questions above are not identical, but they both refer to the taste of a lemon.

Or another example:

“Does the airplane has wings?”

“No”

“Draw an airplane.”

Roberts draws an airplane – not too great but with wings.

“What are these?” I am touching wings.

“Wings”

“Does the airplane has wings?”

“No…Yes, yes, yes.”

To make matter worse, when Robert responds incorrectly once, he will keep on making the same mistakes when the questions are repeated to him in the next few minutes.  (Interspersed with others).

My conviction that Robert knows more than his score on the quiz indicates, is supported by many more examples.

Although the ability to answer questions is not entirely reliable method of checking ones’ knowledge about the environment, it is still a tool to measure the  chasm between Robert and the “typical” crowd raised on questions and tests… And that chasm can be  very deep.

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by krymarh on September 20, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on September 20, 2012

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Now You Know It, Now You Don’t

During the last three years Robert was tested twice with the same test of academic achievement.  After the first test, the person who administrated the test wrote an IEP in which she stressed over and over, how very low the results were.  Very, very low.

I don’t think the numbers changed significantly during the second testing. But there was a difference.  This time, the teacher supported his report with a few pages with Robert’s answers.  Maybe he shouldn’t do that.  After all, the questions are usually kept secret.  Releasing them might compromise the sanctity of the test. I  am, however, very grateful to that teacher for letting me have an insight into Robert’s performance on that test.

One part specially attracted my attention.  It was a set of 38 question which required “yes” and “no” answers.  The questions related to the generally known facts and, in my opinion, Robert knows them all.   And yet, he failed this test.He answered the first question correctly and then from it down he just circled “Yes”, “No”, “Yes”, “No” in ABABA pattern.  Only once, by the end of the page, he circled two “Yes” answers.  Something must have distracted him for a second so he missed the beat and he … read a question for a change..

This tendency to answer in ABABA pattern was not new to me.  I encountered it many times before.  Every time, I devised a way to ask the same question in a different format to asses if Robert knew something or if he didn’t.  Not once, I came to the realization that for Robert knowing something doesn’t translate into answering the questions correctly.  Knowing and knowing how to answer are two different skills.

This test was checking Robert’s ability to answer questions, not the basic knowledge related to this set of sentences.   I know  that Robert is familiar with all the facts (with one exception) but he cannot answer questions about those facts.  Even his correct answers should be dismissed as they were as accidental as the wrong ones.

But the skill of answering questions is important in itself.  In this society (as in probably any other)  we demonstrate our understanding by, most and foremost, answering the questions posed by people around us.

So with one axiom, that Robert knows facts, but doesn’t know how to answer questions about those facts I divided questions into two sets and decided explore the conditions which govern Robert’s ability to reply correctly.

I read to Robert 19 of the questions and he made only one mistake.  Had, I not experienced before that Robert was capable of providing correct answers to questions about things he didn’t know nothing about, I would quickly come to the conclusion that simply removing visual cues in a form of written “Yeses and Nos”  would suffice to put Robert back on track.  But, unfortunately, I knew better. From prior lessons I learned that Robert is very skillful in reading nonverbal cues coming from me, even if I am not aware of the existence of signals I send.

I cut 19 remaining questions into 19 strips of paper, and ask Robert to place them on big pieces of paper with huge words “YES’ and “NO”  written on them.  This time Robert correctly placed all “NOs” and incorrectly almost one-third” of the “Yeses” .  I attributed that to a behavior I had already  encountered in the past.  Robert is a very fair guy.  He is as fair to “Yes” as to “NO”.  He wants them to be spread evenly.  Since there were more “Yes” answers, he had to place them with a fewer set of “NOs” so both groups had the same amount of sentences.

Robert is equally capable of answering questions he doesn’t know answer to and of making mistakes in answering questions about facts he knows well.

And that is a problem.

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by krymarh on September 17, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on September 17, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/09/17/now-you-know-it-now-you-dont/

Colonel and Jugsy Therapy

Every Wednesday, Robert and I bring a packet of carrots to The Bridge Center.  We divide the packet into two halves.  The first one is for Jugsy, a veteran horse, who lately enjoys his corral for the most of the day as he is recuperating from leg surgery.   The second half is for Colonel, who took after Jugsy the responsibility of teaching Robert to ride.  Of course, there were other horses before and they taught Robert a lot about riding:  from not bouncing in a saddle to keeping balance, from good posture to careful grooming, from names of equipment to joy of riding.

Jugsy, however, is the first horse who listened to Robert.  Jugsy allowed Robert to lead him around the walls of the arena.  He let Robert weave  between orange cones. He turned right when Robert told him to turn right and he turned left when Robert asked him to.  He went around the barrels and, with some reluctance, walked over the posts.  Jugsy stopped when  Robert ordered him to stop and resumed walking when Robert  gently touched horse’s sides with his feet.  In a horse’s language that touch must have felt more like a whisper than a loud command.  Nonetheless, Jugsy listened and walked.

After Jugsy,  Colonel took over the teaching. Colonel put emphasis on a clarity of communication.He listened as attentively as  Jugsy, but wanted Robert to improve the intelligibility  of his “speech”.   Gentle touch would not suffice to move Colonel. Robert had to kick the sides of a horse a little more assertively.  To convince Colonel not to avoid walking over posts, Robert had to hold the rains very firmly.

Jugsy and Colonel  listened to Robert, so  Robert kept on “speaking” to them for 30 minutes every week.  I don’t think there is another creature in the whole world, who has listened to Robert as much as those two horses have.  By attentive listening and calm compliance both horses installed in Robert the strong belief in the power of communication.

Of course, it has to be said that at this phase Robert is mostly a translator.  He translates commands given by instructors into horses’ language.

The instructors say,  “Go to the letter A (letters are attached to the walls) , turn left, and weave”, or” Tell Colonel to stop at letter B”, or “Tell Jugsy to walk” and Robert translates those directions into the language horses understand.  In this way Robert is a medium between trainers and horses.  This has a positive impact as it forces Robert to listen and process directions while engaging in the activity.  It is a good exercise for both: working memory, and attention.

For the most of the “typical” riders that would be enough.  From that point on they would take over and make their own decision as to where and how they want to ride.  But for Robert making and/or expressing his own preferences  as to where and how to lead the horse is  almost impossible.

I am hopeful, however,  that Colonel and Jugsy with  the help from the riding instructors will encourage Robert to  find his own words, and make his own choices while in the saddle and everywhere else..

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by krymarh on September 9, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on September 9, 2012

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Understanding Robert… Fifteen Years later.

When Robert was 4, 5, 6, and 7 years old, he often drove with me to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to pick up his sister, Amanda, after her art classes.

At that time, it was not easy to drag Robert everywhere. He had a tendency to bolt whenever he could  and an uncanny ability to wiggle out of my hand. I had to be always on guard and, well,  that was stressful.  Still, for more than a year, no major tantrum had happened during those trips and I began to relax.  Even more, I  decided to use our weekly expeditions to the Museum to make short visits to galleries.  Just one room, or a part of one room. A few pictures, or a few sculptures. Just a few. We stopped in front of the artifact, and looked.  Well, I looked, and encouraged Robert to look as well. He glanced a few times. I hardly remember my comments.  I know they were short and obvious.  And if I asked Robert any question it had to be only about colors, as colors were the only things he could name. The simplicity and banality of our artistic critiques probably offended more sophisticated visitors, as they scurried away from us, as soon as they heard our sort of a dialogue.

Sometimes, we didn’t talk at all as we slowly walked through the sections of the Museum that displayed musical instruments, Japanese tea sets, Chinese furniture, or Egyptian Mummies.

After  ten minutes long encounters with art, we returned to the Rotunda where Amanda was  putting last touches on art of her own. A few more strokes of a brush and the three of us were on the way home.

Once, however,  we returned too early.  The class was already winding itself up, but Amanda needed 15 more minutes to finish.  I decided that Robert and I would wait for her outside on the sunny and breathy stairs in front of the main entrance. As I started leaving, Robert spread himself on the  tile floor, screaming and kicking. With huge difficulties and a  lot of embarrassment I picked him up and carried him outside.  On the way out,  he demonstrated a full range of his abilities to free himself from my hold.  Like a fluid he seeped out of my arms and not once I had to pick him up again gathering all his kicking and wiggling parts.

I was not prepared for that behavior. I did not expect it.  I didn’t know what to do. I wondered how I would survive the next fifteen minutes.  I was petrified of going back to the  museum with this untamed creature in my arms. I was hoping he would calm himself down.

To my surprise, he did.  And just in time.  When I started going up the stairs back to the museum,  Robert didn’t try to wiggle out of my hand.  He made a few groaning sounds to let me know that he still held a grudge, but at least he didn’t attempt to escape.

I am not sure  if Amanda noticed anything. If she did, she didn’t let me know.

For the next few years, Amanda continued with her art classes, but Robert and I stopped visiting the galleries. I was too scared to go back not knowing what caused this tantrum so we waited on the stairs until Amanda came out.

We resumed our visits to the Museum four or five years later.  We don’t  often go there  as Robert prefers Science Museum in Boston or Museum of Natural History in New York, but we still do go there from time to time.  And there never was another incident.

It took me 15 years to understand the reasons for the tantrum.  Just a couple days ago it came to me, that Robert had tried to prevent me from leaving the place without his sister.  She was always coming with us, but on that day, I was, in his eyes, abandoning her.  He could not allow that.  He wanted her to come with us.   But how could he share his concerns with me when he wasn’t even able to pronounce her name?

I should have known better.  Around the same time, another incident happened.  When the car we were driving started making funny noises, I  left it at the nearby gas station.  As we walked home, Robert protested vehemently every step we were making.  He did not want to go home.  He ran in the opposite direction. Amanda ran after him, caught him, and waited for me to carry him home. I did.    I immediately understood that Robert wanted to get our car back.  He was upset that we left it behind.  The car was a part of our family and we abandoned it.

If  I understood Robert’s motives in regards to our car, why I didn’t understand Robert when he protested leaving his sister in the Museum? Why did I believe that Robert was so attached to our car that he couldn’t tolerate leaving it at the gas station, but didn’t realize that Robert was even more concerned about his sister being abandoned at the Museum?

Such dissonance, sadly, came from my own faulty perception of Robert.  I saw his autism first, and the “normal” boy later. So it was harder for me to acknowledge Robert’s affection toward his sister, than his attachment to the car.

I regret that fifteen years ago, I didn’t understand what Robert tried to tell me.  Had I understood it, we would make more trips to the Museum galleries, talking about colors and attracting patronizing scorns of sophisticated consumers of art. Sure, I regret that. But  what really pains me today is that I did not realize what Robert was thinking at that time and thus  I could connect neither with his feelings nor his thoughts.

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by krymarh on September 9, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on September 9, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/09/09/understanding-robert-fifteen-years-later/

Simon Says Teach Conditional Directions

On August 23 New York Times published an article Simon Says Don’t Use Flash Cards.  The article reported on a research which claimed the superiority of specific games over flash cards in teaching young children. The games, need to be said, required the children,  more or less explicitly,  to follow conditional directions.  Since I didn’t find in the article any referral to children with disabilities I had to assume that the research did not include participants with autism. Despite that I believe that the teachers and therapists of children with autism should read the article carefully and supplement their students’ IEPs with some of the mentioned games or their variations.

Sadly, only once ( in 2006)  I was told by the speech therapist of the importance of teaching the concept of  “First….then” .  That was not exactly,”If….then” but it was pretty close.  Short of formal teaching, I used “First… then” a lot during those errands I did with Robert. I would say, ” First we will go to the grocery store, to buy X, Y, and Z  then to McDonald” . In 2006 Robert was at home for four and a half month, so we did a lot of errands together and a lot of practicing of  “First…then.”construction.  Soon from “First…then” we moved forward in two directions.  One lead to making longer list of errands that would include bank, post office, store, and McDonald at the end. Second direction lead toward understanding  cause and effect relations as they applied to Robert’s actions.  “If you do this, then we  do that.” I do believe that I used this phrase a lot, but  don’t remember the circumstances or Robert’s reactions.

I do remember that with the help of this construction I was able to “convince” Robert in 2011 to buy a shirt. Previously, Robert never let us leave the store with a piece of clothing purchased for him.  Never.  With the help of the sentence, “Only if we buy a shirt in Wal-Mart and take it out of the store (Very important distinction, as on one occasion Robert let me pay for a shirt, and then grabbed it and ran to put it back on the same rack he took it from.), we can go to Applebee’s for lunch.”

By that day in 2011 when Robert with mixed emotions carried a bag with a new shirt to the car, we had already completed two trainings related to conditional sentences and directions.

One involved a book Comprehending “Conditional Directions”  That Begin with “IF”.  Robert understood such directions , for instance “If the giraffe can fly, touch your nose” with the help of a simple algorithm. I placed the first part “If the giraffe can fly” in a box at the top center of the page. Two lines lead from this box to either “yes” or “no”.  From “yes” the line went toward second part of the clause (“Touch your nose”), from “no” the line went to the expression, “Do nothing”. Later we simplified the presentation of such algorithms hoping that Robert would apply the concept with reduced support.  He never get fluent but he seemed to grasp the concept.

Second training come in the summer of 2010 when I started using level A of SRA program Reasoning and Writing”.  In a simple graphic method involving  pictures of two people doing different things (one person representing a teacher, second a student)  and an arrow the program introduced the novel for Robert concept: “If the teacher do this, I do that.”

That was a revolution! Robert went through years of discrete trails in which the emphasis was on doing what the teacher did, or what the teacher asked him to do.  Robert became all too good in imitating other people gestures and following simple commands to be suddenly forced to do something different, or even worse: Not to do what he was told or rather shown in the picture above the arrow. The teacher in the picture was touching her nose, the student in the picture was tapping his head.  If I touched my nose, Robert was supposed to tap his head. But how could he?  For 8 years he was taught to do the same! Moreover, when he finally  grasped that he should do something different, I confused him even more by touching my ear (instead of nose) and NOT ALLOWING HIM TO TAP HIS HEAD!

It took a few weeks of practice before Robert understood the concept and even found it entertaining. Still, he forgets it quickly as imitation was strongly imprinted in his brain by eight years of practice.
The same applies to conditional sentences.  After longer break he is unsure what to do.  But surprisingly he became pretty good at understanding “IFs” as they relate to his own life’s activities.  That,in turn, increased his ability to adjust to new situations and novel conditions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Sadly, Robert never played “Simon Says” which requires similar skills to those we practiced with Reasoning and Writing. He was unable to play it when he was younger.

He doesn’t have anybody to play it with  now, when he, probably, can.

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by krymarh on August 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Teaching Out of Autism
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Posted by krymarh on August 29, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/08/29/simon-says-follow-conditional-directions/

Walking a Crooked Timeline

During July and August, I stopped using our regular curricula:  Momentum Math, 6th Grade level,  Saxon Math 4thGrade,  Reasoning and Writing Level C,  Horizon Reading C-D and instead I returned to  the old workbooks, which I bought over the years.. Some of these materials I used before once or twice.  I had made copies of all the pages and left the originals intact knowing, all too well, that Robert would need to either review, practice, or relearn the same concepts in the future.

This summer, we finally completed work on the  set of four  Fisher Price  workbooks.  Each workbook emphasized one question: Who, What, Where, and When.  Published and purchased in 1999, those preschool level workbooks  waited long to be completed. A few times, in the past we opened them, read a few questions, and practiced answering them. It didn’t go well despite different approaches. So, every time, I stopped for one reason or another.  This summer, we followed through to the end of each book.    Robert still doesn’t know some of the answers, but he knows most of them.  So it is a relatively easy task. Its simplicity  takes the pressure out of talking. Reducing the pressure became more important lately as Robert became more self-conscious about his speech and thus more stressed.

We have worked on a few Math workbooks levels 3-5.  I bought them during the last four years in Barnes and Noble, Local Teacher’s Supply Store, or Costco.  Some of the problems and math games we did before. Now we just finished what we omitted.  Although Robert knows most of the required arithmetic, he has problems with following directions when they are presented in a way he was not accustomed to. So presenting the same math operations in a new context or using them for a new purpose demands that Robert pays attention to language and  flexibly  switches from one set of tasks to another.

We returned to the same  four vocabulary workbooks for grades 1-2, we worked on during the last  school year. Over the previous few months I used and overused some of the new words wherever and whenever they seemed suitable.  Now, I stressed independence while working on  some of the exercises.  I left Robert alone with  short quizzes. He reluctantly  filled the blanks with proper words. Very reluctantly.  It is possible that he will never use many of the words we practiced. I think that he, nonetheless,  should at least be exposed to them so when he hears them he can connect them to the concepts they represent or at least recognize them as something familiar.

We are still working on a second grade reading skills.  This year I bought two nonfiction workbooks from Top Readers series.  The texts are much easier, and definitely shorter than the stories from workbooks we used previous summers. Because the texts are short, but accompanied by pictures they are like postcards sent from all over the world. Its past and present.  This is an ideal summer reading.  It is simple, and clear.  No decoding the meanings of new words, no excessive search for answers to the questions, no making inferences, no  memorizing of any important facts, and no following a story map. We did all of that before with all kinds of fiction.  This year we relax. We read the greetings from ancient Greece, from a jungle, a coral reef, or a moon with a growing admiration for the world.

We finished the World Geography workbook written with 6th graders in mind.  Again and again we went over oceans, continents, lines of longitude and latitude and time zones.  Time zones we encountered before while following  Saxon Math curriculum.  Coordinates didn’t seem hard, because Robert knew how to find coordinates of numbers on the plane.  Remembering oceans and continents proved to be a challenge.  Luckily, we worked on copies of the pages and we still have originals to go back and relearn. Besides we can always look at the  globe or a map of the world and review the names.  When I think about that, I realize that I didn’t utilize the map sufficiently. We worked mostly with a globe, but he globe is much harder to learn from.  It moves and it is tilted..

Another example of turbulence on a  timeline, relates to the cards for apraxia.  As I was practicing with cards designed for adults,  I felt that something was missing. After some searches through catalogues  I decided that what was missing was a box of preschool level apraxia cards as it offered slightly different approach to practicing speech.  So for the last few weeks Robert and I were using both sets – the one for adults and one for preschoolers.

The main reason I am using all that supplemental materials is that it allows me to find the holes in Robert’s knowledge  and fill those voids.  I don’t have another way of finding out what Robert knows or what he doesn’t know.  More precisely,  HOW he knows things. He cannot tell me.  Many of my questions would be impossible for him to understand.  Those materials help Robert and help me.  Even the best curriculum cannot cover every aspect of every concept.  So-called typical children, who have language that matches their age, can fill those gaps all on their own.

Robert cannot.

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by krymarh on August 27, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on August 27, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/08/27/walking-a-crooked-timeline/

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