What's on our Plate Right Now!

Oh so much is going on right now! I could do lengthy posts about each of these things, but the time to do so just isn't here right now.



We have decided to enroll Samuel in public school. He will be entering 6th grade and will attend a "middle school." I am in no rush to get him there, they are moving to a new building. I'm sure I'm correct in guessing that the finishing touches of the building's renovation will be going on right up to the moment of the doors opening tomorrow! Also, I want him to transition VERY GRADUALLY back to school. We haven't even had the IEP meeting yet. All the details of his returning to school have yet to be worked out. I am looking for a part time start beginning with just the same amount of Speech therapy he has had at the schools for the past 3 years, then getting him to go to classes in the afternoon. My primary concern is for him to have the opportunity to work on his social skills.



In the past few weeks we have started some new in-home services, to specifically address Samuel's behavior difficulties. We are receiving them from a different source than we did 5 years ago. I am very impressed with the people who are working with us and I hope to post more about what we are doing soon.



Samuel is continuing to develop a strong sensitivity to the expression of emotions. Funny, I have been reading on one or two other blogs about how other children on the spectrum that are around Samuel's age are going through the same thing. If he hears songs on the radio that are emotional or sad he immediately wants the station changed! During a reading at church yesterday he asked, "Is this serious?" He asks the same question when he listens to news stories on TV. And, as has been happening for a while, he absolutely cannot tolerate discussions between my husband and I in which our vocal expression has anything resembling "seriousness." The problem with this is that my husband has a rather deep voice and an intense personality.. so Samuel is always misreading his mood! I am thrilled for Samuel's increased awareness of what is going on.. but it is making life rather crazy!

Let's see, what else is going on? After having some success with Samuel in a temporary tae kwon do class this summer I want to start him with some classes this fall. That might have to be on an individual basis at first. I had to closely shadow him during the summer session but I want him to learn to participate independently.

Samuel is taking part in a computer study being done by a phd student, who wants to test her hypothesis that word-recognition software helps students with autism improve their writing abilities. (This has been lots of fun, but has been challenging!)

At home he has started to work independently on some phonics curriculums, both on the computer. His attention span is so much better when working on the computer! Ironically, as we are considering putting him in school I feel like I finally "have it figured out" with his academics at home! I will consider this strongly as we develop his IEP.

Also, we are continuing to monitor his behavior after starting him on Risperdal a few months ago. If you have read my blog or if you know me, you know that I have always considered medication as a last resort. Well, we reached a critical point this past winter. If I ask Samuel why he takes the medication his answer is, "to help me be a good boy." Interesting, we certainly never explained it that way to him, rather it was explained as something to help him control himself when he got upset.

Do we have enough going on?!

I should not forget to mention... these are only Samuel's "goings on," there are 3 other children I have things going on with too!

Success with Spelling

Samuel has made a big leap in his spelling! He has shown that he is able to correctly spell words with consonant digraphs! He has revisited this issue in his spelling over the last 2 years. Occasionally words like "what," "why," "this," would make their way into his spelling list. After a week or so of practising he would still have a problem with the digraphs.

What has changed this? I credit the change mostly to phonics exercises he has been doing on "Time 4 Learning," an on-line curriculum. It is amazing to watch how much more easily Samuel speeds through work on a computer rather than struggling with worksheets and books.

Third and Fourth Checklist Goals are Set!

Samuel has already told me what he wants to work towards on his next two checklists of school assignments: first a trip to McDonalds and then another trip to the Goodwill Store for another video!

I love that we have this mutually beneficial way of accomplishing something each of us wants. Now if I can just figure out how to motivate my NT students!

"History of the Years"

Samuel has a funny new way of showing his interest in history. He keeps asking us what happened in a particular year. My husband was watching a show on the History Channel last night about World War II. Samuel came in the room and asked, "What year is this?" My oldest son left a book he is reading about the War of 1812 in their bedrom; Samuel asked me, "What happened in 1812?" He also keeps asking me, "What happened in 1944?" and while he was getting a bath the other night he asked me, "What happened in the year 1?"

I'm sure if I asked him, he could tell me what year every video game was introduced. That seems to be where this interest in years came to the forefront for him. He has been watching a YouTube video that covers the history of video games and has been scripting it for the past few weeks. One time he told me, "I'm going to watch, 'The History of the Years.'" I asked him what that was about and he explained it was about the video games. Not long after this is when he started to ask all the questions about years.

I need to capitalize on this interest Samuel has for teaching him some history! Does anyone know about any good books or other resources for timelines?

Happy 2009!!!

Well, Christmas is over and another new year begins! We returned to school work this week. I was without one of Samuel's helpers while she was on vacation with her family. In spite of that we got by okay. Samuel had much fewer outbursts, even with the demands of school work being put upon him. We'll see how next week goes, when I try to get more work in.

I think Samuel may have FINALLY learned how to zip his jacket! We have been working on that for so long. I realized that the kind of jacket we had him wear was too difficult for him to work with. We usually get Land's End jackets, which are wonderful, but the way the zippers are covered makes it way too difficult for Samuel to maneuver it. He has a very hard time getting the separate parts of the zipper together. I bought a cheap jacket at a local discount store that doesn't have a covered zipper and it's much easier for him to work with that.

I have started using Saxon Math with Samuel. His younger brother has been working in it. I was reminded that Samuel's teacher had used it with him when he was younger. So, we're repeating first grade math again, but I am much more confident he will be successful in this. I was having to make too many alterations to the other workbook curriculum I was using for him.

Seton Home Study curriculum is what I am using for my youngest and oldest sons. While we are provided with a daily schedule for each subject, I did find this statement in the curriculum materials, which I take great comfort in given that we deviated from the schedule after about Day 2 of the school year:

There is no "getting behind" in homeschooling; the pace should be according to
the needs of the student.

Granted, I could be a little more organized, but I don't think I'm doing too bad given all the preparation that has to go into getting Samuel's lessons together and all the chaos our days sometimes holds because of his behavior.

Between School Years

I have mentioned before that school is an ongoing, year-round endeavor in our household. We take breaks when there are special events, holidays or vacations. We also run on a relaxed schedule during part of the summer. That is where we are with school work right now. Samuel is participating in a "speech camp" this week and his older brother is participating in a "history camp." Both of these occur in the morning. In the afternoon, after we have had our lunch and taken a rest, I come up with a bit of work for the boys to do. Samuel has been filling in his calendar, writing in a journal, finishing up his religion book. I also found some workbooks at a wonderful teacher supply store up in Maine.



The store where I got the workbooks is called Play and Learn Toys and Teaching Resources and it is located in Freeport. It has become a family tradition to visit while we are on vacation here. My children love it for all the cool toys. They have a fun Thomas the Tank Engine display and it kept them entertained while I took a long look at the teacher supplies. I am always so tempted to buy all kinds of posters, workbooks and bulletin board supplies, but this year I restricted myself to just a few workbooks and stickers. I will have Samuel work on the two books shown in this photo during the month of August. They are both from Carson-Dellosa Publishing. I really like the "All About Me" book. It is 64 pages long and in it he gets to draw all kinds of pictures and fill in blanks to tell about himself. It's a pre-k to grade 1 level and it is perfect for Samuel. It's easy, the pages are visually "do-able" for him (no color or distracting pictures) and the assignments are short. Also, there is a sticker chart built in to the back cover of the book. I am hoping that Samuel will enjoy filling it in and feel a sense of accomplishment. I'm looking forward to him completing the pages where he tells us what his favorite color is, and what he wants to be when he grows up. He doesn't usually talk about these kinds of things on his own. (In the past he has answered "firefighter" when he is asked what he wants to be when he grows up. I'm curious to see if he'll say that again. It's hard to know if he really means it. He never demonstrates that outside of being asked that question. I wouldn't put it past Samuel to just say an answer to get people to stop asking him the question.)

The Scissor Skills book is also very easy, at least it starts off that way. It looks like it will get much more appropriately challenging as he works through it. I ended up getting scissor skill books for Samuel's younger brother and sister as well. I never would have allowed my two oldest boys to try scissors at age 2, but I am comfortable letting my little girl, age 2, do so now. I make sure she only tries it while I am close by at the table with her. She just loves "working" at the table like her big brothers do!

My big job for the month of August is to write up a new IEP for Samuel, choose and order curriculum materials for him, and organize work for my two other sons. I already have their books. This is the first year that I am using a pre-organized curriculum for both of his brothers, in which I "enrolled" both boys and will send off some of their work for grading. I may end up ordering some of Samuel's workbooks from the same place, but there is no way that he can follow a packaged curriculum.

Wrapping up the School Year - An Immense Relief!

Oldest son's standardized testing is finished, ready to be sent off for grading. Samuel's work has been evaluated and I have the evaluator's summary letter in hand. I don't yet need to send in any "numbers" for youngest son's work, that begins at age 6 in Virginia. Best of all, I think everything went well this year. My first year homeschooling three children is over and I can still say I think I made the right choice to take Samuel out of school so that I could teach him at home. Not that everything is perfect, we have lots of room for improvement (who doesn't!?), but I'm happy having all my kids at home right now.

I recently went through the exercise of actually writing out the goals and objectives we were working on for Samuel this year. I feel so much more organized now in what we are aiming for with him. The plan I have developed for Samuel is so much more accurate than the school's plan in terms of what we really want him to achieve. Seven out of ten of his goals are related to his life skills. His previous plan only had buttoning, zipping, and controlling his behavior that addressed these things. There is so much more that he needs to accomplish than that, and I have found that educating him at home is the best way to tackle these goals. It was hard to narrow down everything to just 10 goals, there are so many things we are working on with him!

After our vacation I'll be coming up with a new IEP for Samuel and will be busy checking out all the curriculum recommendations I got from the education consultant. All of this on top of still checking out RDI, and everything else I want to do! There aren't enough hours in the day!

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.

Current Challenges and Some Fun Things

Reacting appropriately when something goes wrong is one challenge we face with Samuel. One morning last week a favorite DVD of his got scratched and he threw an absolute fit over the fact that it would not work. He came close to pushing the DVD player off the shelf it is kept upon. He hasn't done anything like that in a long time and it was quite frightening. It especially frightened my two year old daughter, who has not seen Samuel agitated to that degree recently. Our in-home helper assisted in trying to calm Samuel down. It took almost 45 minutes and it pushed everyone's school work behind that day.

Another challenge has been to keep Samuel from scripting too much. I do not have a problem with Samuel scripting from time to time, but it can get in the way of him doing things that he needs to do. Getting through a session of school work can take three or four times longer because he will not focus on his work. Sometimes I try to get his attention by holding visual aids in front of him and at other times (when there is an especially reinforcing activity to follow) I wait him out.

Appropriate behavior in public is another area of concern. Going to the library has been a good place to practise appropriate behavior. There was a time I had to stop taking him because his behavior was too disruptive. He hit a child there one time when I told him he had to stop playing on the computer. In-home helpers assisted us by going with us several times. They helped us make up a visual schedule and now, two years later, most trips go well. Recently, Samuel has started trying to talk to other children. He is curious about videos that others check out and he asks them about them. Today he tried talking to a very young girl who was playing on the computer. He just wanted to know what she was playing, but I could tell he was frightening her.

I took him out to McDonalds after the library, and as we were leaving he went to the booth next to ours and took a french fry from a young boy's lunch! I was so embarrassed! Fortunately his Mom was very understanding. Interestingly, Samuel was remorseful about it by the time we got to the car. He wanted to go back inside and apologize! I had asked him to do so while we were still inside, but he resisted. I did not want to cause any more of a scene so we did not go back in. I had already apologized to the Mom. Samuel kept talking about it for a good portion of the trip home. He wanted to know if I was going to tell his Dad about it! He is expressing remorse frequently. He will say "I'm sorry" after he has done something wrong. Sometimes he will perseverate on that remorse and get emotional (yell or cry). I tell him that it's good to be sorry and I try to remind him to think about what he is doing before he acts.

Samuel and his two year old sister have had some cute discussions lately. I have overheard them sitting together looking at his videos. She asked him about them and he seemed to like answering her questions. They also sit together in front of her dollhouse. They don't exactly play together, most of the time it is fighting over things. She gets a little possessive when she sees Samuel go to play with it. I try to redirect her away from the particular dolls and pieces that Samuel has, but of course those are THE ones she wants!

Samuel has become much more conversant lately. When we are out in public or when others arrive at our home he is very quick to say "hello!" The other day someone arrived to do a termite inspection at our house and Samuel greeted him with, "Hello, we're so glad to see you!" He also tried greeting people at the table next to ours at a restaurant, and he did so with people at church. I would like to think his motives for doing so were good, and I'm sure they were, but afterwards he told me, "Look Mom, I'm talking to strangers!" He has just read The Berenstain Bears book about strangers! I can see that we will need to do some fine tuning of Samuel's behavior in public, but I am sure glad that I can take him places now!

"Three Things, Great Job Mom!"

Each time Samuel approaches his visual schedule and sees "Work Time" (the schedule piece I use when it is time for him to do his school work) I catch him peeking over to the table where I have a mini-schedule of the tasks he is to do that session. He used to do something like this when he entered his classroom at school; he would look over to the table where his teacher made his daily schedule to see what was on the agenda for the day. In earlier grades his schedule was posted on the wall so he would look to that as soon as he entered the room.

Last week one day he took a look at the mini-schedule and said "Three things, great job Mom!" Today when he looked at it he said, "Wow! Three things!" He seems genuinely happy!

"I Don't Want to Do Five Things!"

We're slowly returning to our "normal" school routine, the one we had before we left for our vacation. Our first week back I unpacked, last week we had visitors and it was Samuel's birthday, and yesterday I had to take my daughter for a doctor checkup. So, today was one of our first days back to work!

I made up an ambitious work schedule to start Samuel's morning. I had his token board ready with the reinforcer of raisins after each time he earned four tokens. I figured Samuel might balk at the schedule and, sure enough, he did. He pulled out his negotiation tactics and said, "I don't want to do five things!" I wasn't about to bend first thing in the morning so I replied, "Yes, you are going to do five things, they're easy things!" I knew I was stretching things a bit for Samuel. We often start the morning with only 3 or 4 tasks. My goodness though, he got to sleep in this morning and I gave him some TV time before breakfast, he needed to be challenged a bit! I had to coax Samuel here and there, and had to wait him out a bit, but he got through all five things!

Challenging Samuel in his negotiations doesn't always work. In this case if it had not worked out and he had a meltdown, I would have sent him with his personal attendant up for a "break" in his room. Taking a "break" was a strategy introduced to us by the in-home helpers we used to have. It is a means of letting Samuel cool down a bit before he returns to the task that he is expected to do. A "break" icon sits up in the corner of his visual schedule for him to remove whenever he needs one. We had to teach him how to remove the card (we would model for him, "I need a break," hand-over-hand have him remove the card, and assist him in going up to his room).

The going was a little rocky this morning, but I was happy he got through the work without requesting a break! Five tasks, that's great for first thing in the morning!