School Work , Part I, "Work Time I"

It has taken a while, but finally, as we are entering the last quarter of Samuel's school year, there is a pattern to our school day. On our best days we sit together four or five times at our kitchen table to do school work. I'll talk in this post about "Work Time One", the first time we sit together. This session usually includes CALENDAR, HANDWRITING, ENGLISH, and TIME.



"CALENDAR" is done with an average sized wall calendar, along with a laminated page for the current day. Samuel's job is to fill in information for that day, with velcro-backed pieces that he has to select off another laminated page. First he crosses off the previous day on the wall calendar. Then I might prompt him by saying, "Today is the _______" and I wait for him to say the correct date. After that, I lay the laminated page in front of him that he has to fill in. He then has to look at the other page to select the correct day of the week, month, date, year, and the weather. After filling it in he has to read it out loud. The laminated pages were made by a previous in-home helper. Samuel had another calendar to fill in previously, but this current one was made about a year ago. At first, he had to be prompted EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, and only three of four possible selections could be placed in front of him. When I started doing the calendar with him I could put more selections in front of him, but I still had to prompt him every step of the way. Now, I can place all the selections in front of him and on most days I hardly have to prompt him at all.



"HANDWRITING" involves practising his printing. My goals for this year were to review all the letters with him and to address his problems of placing them correctly on the page. Next school year we will work more on choosing correctly between using upper case or lower case letters.

We just finished reviewing all the letters a few weeks ago. "Y," both upper and lower case, "n", "a", and "u" were also problems. A few months ago I started prompting Samuel to place the letters correctly on the paper by having him read, "I can write neatly between the lines," before he did his exercise. This prompt has helped a bit, he is doing a better job of following the lines on the paper. Now we are talking about where we correctly start our upper case and lower case letters on the paper. At the beginning of the school year he did not like for me to say anything about his writing. It's still tricky trying to say anything to him as he is doing his work. Though it is very slow going, the written prompts (which he reads day after day after day) are better for getting through to him as opposed to verbal prompts to make corrections.

We use "Handwriting Without Tears." He just completed the kindergarten book. I'll take the next month or so to review problem letters, work more with proper letter placement (making up my own exercises), and I will have him start the next level book after that.



"TIME" In this lesson Samuel is learning how to tell time on a clock face. He could tell time on the hour, half hour, and 15 minute marks at the beginning of the school year. I have been trying to teach him to the 5 minute mark. We use a talking teaching clock for this. He does well up to 30 minutes after the hour. For minutes higher than this, he often gets confused about the hour, since at this point the hour hand points more to the next hour number on the clock. So far, the best approach has been for me to write out a series of times he has to put on the teaching time clock. I start at the top of the hour and go ahead from there. At first I only had him try four different times. I just recently moved it to ten times to complete. This lets us try lots of different times within the same hour. As he gets more comfortable with this I will start to fade out the earlier times in the hour, until he can successfully find times like "8:50" . Right now if I was to ask him to find this he would place the hands at "7:50", since at that point the hour hand looks like it points to 8.



In "ENGLISH" I have Samuel completing a first grade workbook. We are currently working on contractions and correct sentence punctuation. At the beginning of the school year I had to re-type all of the lessons from the workbook into a larger font, he could not work out of the workbook. Now we are able to use the workbook most of the time; I use a cover on the page so he only sees the current problem and I only have him do four or five problems at a time.

Autism Awareness Month

As Autism Awareness Month approached this year I was gearing up to write some posts on the subject, but it seems that I have been overcome with a spell of writer's block and busy Mom syndrome, at least for the time being!

Here are a few quotes from things I have watched or read in the last week or prior to that:

"Art is the voice of autism." I heard this on the hour long show that CNN did about autism around the world last Tuesday afternoon. While I don't necessarily think that all individuals with autism are necessarily artists, I can see that art can be a good outlet for many individuals with autism. For my son, music is the form of art that he seems to be most drawn to.

"Finding a cure for autism is like finding a cure for blue eyes." This quote is on the home page of a My Space page done by a teenage girl who identifies herself as Female 15 years old Dudley, Midlands United Kingdom. I like this quote. The more I hear about autism and the supposed "epidemic" of it that is occurring, the more I am convinced that it is something that has been a part of humanity all along, as Roy Richard Grinker shares in his book "Unstrange Minds." This is a quote I have shared before:

This book therefore addresses the clear rise in the prevalence of autism - and, more precisely, the range of conditions now called autism spectrum disorders -- by exploring the cultural factors that have changed our perspectives on children and mental disorders. The shift in how we view autism, in other words, is part of a set of broader shifts taking place in
society.

....the newer, higher, more accurate statistics on autism are a sign that we are finally seeing and appreciating a kind of human difference that we once turned away from and that many other cultures still hide away in homes or
institututions or denigrate as bizarre.

I don't want Autism Awareness Month to be a month of fear and pity, I want to see more Autism Acceptance!