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25 Jun 2006 - 18:57
Still getting my act together on the summer program around here. Andrew's set. He's doing KUMON Math and, as of today, KUMON Reading. Amazing KUMON moment this week: I took a set of worksheets to school to show Andrew's teacher & aide how well he does with them. Good thing I did, because they had no idea whether Andrew can or cannot do beginning addition. The answer is that he can, and they're the ones who taught him. They were blown away when they saw him whiz through a sheet of add-ones problems. The problems were sufficiently mixed that it was clear he understood the principle; x + 1 means the next number up from x. The sheets I'd brought in had problems in the 30s, I think (30 + 1, 32 + 1, etc.). After he did a few of those I skipped ahead to the last sheet in the stack. The final problem was:
1000 + 1 =
Andrew frowned at this and hesitated. Then he typed "1000" on the AlphaSmart. I was mortified. I figured this was the moment where his teacher and aide would decide he was just learning by rote. But I was wrong. They were both watching him intently. I said, "No, 1000 plus 1." Andrew hadn't stopped frowning at the problem, which I think is part of what had his teachers so interested. He reached out his hand, and deleted the final zero, then typed in '1.' 1001 They couldn't believe it. The mistake was what convinced them he knew what he was doing. I don't know whether they've seen him self-correct before; they probably have. But watching him self-correct while doing a brand-new problem no one's ever shown him was the magic. As impressed as they were, they stilll wanted to know whether Andrew could add ones if you wrote them in a different way, on a different kind of paper. This is the "hyper-specificity" problem that's so frustrating with autistic kids, and that is the center of Animals in Translation. The reason they were so frustrated with his progress in class, apparently, is that his performance is inconsistent – and the inconsistency seems to be related to changing fonts or paper, etc. I’d never checked to make sure Andrew could do the same problems in different fonts and on different size paper (which I should have). They gave me a sheet of paper, and I hand-wrote a ones problem. Andrew answered it instantly. They were convinced. They were so convinced that they said they wanted to use KUMON as Andrew’s math curriculum this summer. We talked about what the problem might be for awhile, and none of us knows. I'm guessing the problem is that the school doesn’t have a math curriculum for Andrew, mainly because there isn’t one, although KUMON may serve. Clarice ordered Engelmann’s DISTAR program back when she was hired, and she gave it to me to take home. I got to spend two days holding the Presentation Book in my hands (I wish Ken had been there!) It looked like everything it’s cracked up to be, but it didn’t look like something a teacher could do with Andrew. I suppose you could type the script and have Andrew read it....which might be a good idea. I had to return the program the next day, and didn’t have enough time to think it through. What's happening in class is that Andrew will seem to have mastered an addition fact, but then later on will seem to have lost it. For the time being, I'm assuming that because they don't have a curriculum any one or all of 3 things has happened:
As to the first, KUMON's worksheets are the ultimate coherent curriculum. The child does many, many worksheets on adding one to a number before moving on to add 2s to a number. KUMON doesn't stop with the within-ten addition facts, either. Instead it takes the child all the way from 1 + 1 to 1000 + 1 before moving on to + 2. Clarice hasn't done that, I don't think. I think she had him learn all the various addition facts up to 10. She said Andrew will seem to have mastered 6 + 4 = 10, but then when they ask him 6 + 4 a week later, he doesn't know. I'm hoping the reason he forgets 6 + 4 is that 6 + 4 doesn't have the meaning it's going to have in KUMON. I'm also wondering whether "massed practice" — aka drill and kill — may be especially important or even critical for developmentally disabled kids. Everyone in the U.S., constructivists & cognitive scientists alike, seems to have decided that distributed practice is the key to the kingdom. (TRAILBLAZERS & EVERYDAY MATH both claim to give children distributed practice.) But I've always found I need to do a certain amount of massed practice in the beginning just to remember a concept well enough to be able to do distributed practice. Andrew is tough to deal with; I bet they haven't made him sit in a chair and do the same addition problems over and over again the way KUMON does. I wouldn't have. In any case, we're moving on to +2 in a couple of days, so at that point I'll start occasionally asking him to do a +1 problem to see if he remembers. We'll see. As to KUMON reading, this morning Andrew was aghast at the discovery that in addition to the 5 KUMON math pages he has to do every day he now has 5 KUMON reading pages, too.
heh
summer school for Christopher First off, I've had my second abject failure in afterschooling books: Sentence Composing for Middle School: A Worktext on Sentence Variety and Maturity by Don Killgallon. I love this book — I even bought the college level one for me — and it's worthless for Christopher. The first exercises ask you to divide a sentence up at its natural breaks. For instance:
The student is supposed to rewrite the sentence putting the slashes where they belong. Christopher can't do it. He's so far away from being able to do it that he doesn't even really get what he's supposed to be doing. The whole thing makes no sense to him at all. I thought he'd start to get the hang of it after awhile, but he didn't. He doesn't have an "ear." Some kids do. My friend Kris's little guy, Charlie, has an ear. I went over one day & he came running up to show me something he'd written. He was missing a comma, and when I pointed it out he stopped in his tracks and talked the sentence to himself under his breath, and he heard where the comma was supposed to go. "Oh yeah!" he said, looking happy. My other afterschooling flop was Daily Paragraph Editing, which I was using in 5th grade. I pushed Christopher through pages & pages of that book without his performance improving a jot. Finally I talked to his teacher, the brilliant Ms. Duque, and she said forget it. The book wasn't teaching him anything. I interpret these failures to be more grist for the direct instruction mill. Christopher needs to be directly taught punctuation and grammar. Period. Then he'll have an ear. I think he will, too. We've finished Megawords Book 3, and his ELA teacher, the other Ms. K, has been giving spelling tests all winter and spring. Ms. Duque taught spelling, too. So he's had a lot of spelling. Suddenly, Christopher is using spelling rules to spell words he doesn't know, and he's getting them right, too. Boy is that great. His spelling is so much better, it's amazing. Back in 3rd grade his spelling was A SCANDAL. It was almost psychotically bad, like those jokes about Eastern European languages with no vowels. These days he's starting to have normal not great spelling. In one paragraph of prose he might have two misspelled words, and those words will be misspelled logically. This is why I'm sure he'll develop an "ear." He's developed whatever the analogous form of implicit knowledge is for spelling; he'll do it for writing, too.
vocabulary, writing, math... So we're putting Killgallon on the shelf for the time being. Christopher will do Vocabulary Workshop, a book I like more and more as we go along. He does one page a day, which takes 5 minutes max. VW teaches words in 5 exercises:
There are 15 units in the book, and you review every three units. 20 words per list; 185 pages in the book. Efficient & effective.
We're big on vocabulary these days. At dinner I make Christian and Christopher learn Greek and Latin roots from English from the Roots Up. So far we've learned photos, graph, tele, metron, tropos, philia, phobos (predictable hilarity with metron, which instantly suggests the neologism metronsexual, philia & phobos), syn, and thesis, although Christian is having a horrible time remembering tropos. For quite a while there he was saying "line" whenever he heard it (too long to explain), so "line" has now become a running gag. I told Christian to come up with a mnemonic device for tropos, but unfortunately the one he came up with caused him to start thinking tropos means revolving, which come to think of it maybe it does. (Does it?) If anyone has a suggestion for a mnemonic device that connects tropos to turning, let me know.
I've also got an ancient copy of Word Power Made Easy (a Google Master recommendation, IIRC) next to the dining room table, so we may get to it, too, one of these days. Then last week Martine went out and bought a dictionary of New York slang, and we all learned the meaning of ace boon coon, a phrase Christian knew and had used. I'm having as much trouble remembering ace boon coon as he is remembering tropos (I can't remember the "ace" part), so we'll see who gets to the finish line first.
Christopher is supposed to take his ALEKS placement test today, so I've got to go figure that out. More later.
my boon companion
-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006 Back to main page.
Please consider registering as a regular user.
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Wow! What a great and amazing story. It must be really hard to have no idea what a kid can do (an understatement, I'm sure). But it sure looks exhilarating to find the things that they can do! -- StephanieO - 25 Jun 2006
When I did the sentence composing book I read the examples the wrong way and then the right way. It's just difficult to understand those sentences with the breaks in the wrong place. I asked him which was the easiest to understand. Only then did he "get" it. Still, I didn't use it too much. Mine needs more direct instruction and practice with things that he resists. Like you, I'm finally seeing results from the Megawords and the Sadlier vocabulary courses. The nice thing about the summer writing course that he's taking is that she is letting them choose their topics. He wrote an expository essay about Pearl Harbor and now he's writing a persuasive essay about why the White Sox are better than the Cubs. He hasn't complained much about this writing class. -- SusanS - 25 Jun 2006
I think "massed practice" is very important in Megan's case. In an article I was reading online about Kumon, it mentioned there is a manual for Kumon instructors working with special needs kids. One of the guidelines mentioned that special needs kids may need even more repetition despite the fact they are within the "standard completion time," and that instructors may want to move on only when the kid can complete the sheets in the minimum completion time. I've seen great improvement w/Meg in her addition facts; before Kumon, she could maybe get 70-75 addition facts right in 5 minutes on the Saxon 54 drill sheets. Now, she finishes 100 in less than 4 minutes. So, at least she can carry on the speed in Kumon to the different format and type face used in Saxon. She just moved on to Level A and takes about 5-6 minutes for 5 sheets. I also love the grammar instruction that comes along with the comprehension/vocabulary in Kumon. 20 pages into Level C1, and Meg learned what an "object" in a sentence is. Of course grammar isn't explicitly taught in school. -- KathyIggy - 25 Jun 2006
Hi Stephanie! It must be really hard to have no idea what a kid can do I think this is one of those cognitive inflexibility areas, where you MUST force yourself to think creatively - AND think creatively in an arena where not only are you not an expert, no one else is, either. For years now I've been standing around in a state of semi-helplessness, basically just assuming that because Andrew can't talk & can't write (physically can't write) there's no way to know whether he understands or not.....which simply can't be true. But it's extremely difficult to figure out how to know-what-Andrew-knows - and obviously his teacher, who does have a lot of experience, is having the same problem. Another thing I've seen: teachers lose their creativity with an individual kid after 3 years. (Another parent formulated this rule, and I think it's true.) Of course, I'm many, many years into this, and my creativity checked out a long time ago.... -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Anyway, I'm constantly trying to give myself a kick in the pants to BRAINSTORM how to figure out what he knows, rather than to give in to the feeling that it's impossible. Thank heavens for KUMON. Not only does the program work, it sparks thoughts. -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Susan Which son is doing VW & MW? Leo, or your little guy? -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Megawords and Vocabulary Workshop are fantastic for Christopher. I'll come back to the Sentence Composing book in a year. I'm going to start Hake this week. -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
oh! your younger son WHERE THE HECK DID YOU FIND A SUMMER WRITING COURSE??? that's what i need -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Actually, that's what I should be offering to kids around here. -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Kathy wow - that's very exciting topost -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
It's Summer School. Love the ole' summer school. It's just preparations for junior high stuff. -- SusanS - 25 Jun 2006
Catherine, I don't know if you ever check out any of the autism blogs. But I found this one: http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/ and it is fascinating. This woman cannot speak, but she writes a very eloquent blog. She is in a wheel chair, requires an aide and was in an institution for a while. Yet she understands and writes about very complicated issues. She writes about facilitated communication which, I believe, is what first helped understand that there was a very intelligent person inside the autistic body. I would be very interested to know what finally helped break her skills loose so that she can write the way she does. -- AnneDwyer - 26 Jun 2006
wait - how does he get to go to summer school?? (or is this Leo?) i'm confused -- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jun 2006
Anne I don't even know the autism blogs! Thanks! Meanwhile....I have to find Brenda's blog....and I don't remember which post she put it on — -- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jun 2006
Our district has summer school for grade/middle school and then one for the high school. They're 4 week deals, although my oldest goes for free to the high school due to special needs. The class is designed to hold off regression of skills (and to help him get familiar with the new school.) -- SusanS - 26 Jun 2006
wow that's amazing do you pay for the classes? -- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jun 2006
We paid for the grade school/junior high ones per class. I'm not paying for the high school one (special ed), but I don't know if others are. They probably are. The high school offers a ton of stuff, academic and otherwise. -- SusanS - 27 Jun 2006
Catherine, Here is an excerpt from an interview on NPR with the woman from the link I gave you. Check out the saying on the T shirt that she wears. Amanda Baggs, 25, has autism. And like some people with autism, she doesn't speak. Instead, she communicates by typing -- with two fingers and fast -- on her keyboard. The computer's voice speaks her words. "We perceive the world differently," says Baggs through a computer. "We think differently. And we respond to the world differently. And that goes for all of us not just some of us." Partly because she doesn't speak, doctors have called her low- functioning. It's a label Baggs says she doesn't put much stock in. "Oh, good grief, yes. The only label I've ever formally gotten is low-functioning," she writes. "I don't believe in functioning levels. High- functioning and low and all that crud is mostly illusions in peoples' heads." Sometimes Baggs wears a T-shirt that says: "Not Being Able to Speak is Not the Same as Not Having Anything to Say." Baggs has a blog where she writes thoughtfully and passionately about autism. "The main theme of the blog," she says, "is that all people are valuable." -- AnneDwyer - 27 Jun 2006
Re: Punctuation and "developing an ear," I wonder if reading along with a book-on-tape would help to do this. You'd hear the rhythm while you saw the punctuation. Recordings would have to be readings rather than performances ... maybe poetry or oratory read by some Distinguished Shakespearian? I'm personally unfamiliar with what might be available, but perhaps your librarian might have some suggestions. -- OldGrouch - 27 Jun 2006
oh - you know, that's a good idea. I hate that term, "low-functioning"! Of course, we need language to convey what "low-functioning" does in fact convey....but that doesn't make me like it any better. Also, the high-functioning/low-functioning opposition denies the bell curve. I used to say my kids were in the great middle class of autism. -- CatherineJohnson - 03 Jul 2006
summer school 2006
Still getting my act together on the summer program around here. Andrew's set. He's doing KUMON Math and, as of today, KUMON Reading. Amazing KUMON moment this week: I took a set of worksheets to school to show Andrew's teacher & aide how well he does with them. Good thing I did, because they had no idea whether Andrew can or cannot do beginning addition. The answer is that he can, and they're the ones who taught him. They were blown away when they saw him whiz through a sheet of add-ones problems. The problems were sufficiently mixed that it was clear he understood the principle; x + 1 means the next number up from x. The sheets I'd brought in had problems in the 30s, I think (30 + 1, 32 + 1, etc.). After he did a few of those I skipped ahead to the last sheet in the stack. The final problem was:
1000 + 1 =
Andrew frowned at this and hesitated. Then he typed "1000" on the AlphaSmart. I was mortified. I figured this was the moment where his teacher and aide would decide he was just learning by rote. But I was wrong. They were both watching him intently. I said, "No, 1000 plus 1." Andrew hadn't stopped frowning at the problem, which I think is part of what had his teachers so interested. He reached out his hand, and deleted the final zero, then typed in '1.' 1001 They couldn't believe it. The mistake was what convinced them he knew what he was doing. I don't know whether they've seen him self-correct before; they probably have. But watching him self-correct while doing a brand-new problem no one's ever shown him was the magic. As impressed as they were, they stilll wanted to know whether Andrew could add ones if you wrote them in a different way, on a different kind of paper. This is the "hyper-specificity" problem that's so frustrating with autistic kids, and that is the center of Animals in Translation. The reason they were so frustrated with his progress in class, apparently, is that his performance is inconsistent – and the inconsistency seems to be related to changing fonts or paper, etc. I’d never checked to make sure Andrew could do the same problems in different fonts and on different size paper (which I should have). They gave me a sheet of paper, and I hand-wrote a ones problem. Andrew answered it instantly. They were convinced. They were so convinced that they said they wanted to use KUMON as Andrew’s math curriculum this summer. We talked about what the problem might be for awhile, and none of us knows. I'm guessing the problem is that the school doesn’t have a math curriculum for Andrew, mainly because there isn’t one, although KUMON may serve. Clarice ordered Engelmann’s DISTAR program back when she was hired, and she gave it to me to take home. I got to spend two days holding the Presentation Book in my hands (I wish Ken had been there!) It looked like everything it’s cracked up to be, but it didn’t look like something a teacher could do with Andrew. I suppose you could type the script and have Andrew read it....which might be a good idea. I had to return the program the next day, and didn’t have enough time to think it through. What's happening in class is that Andrew will seem to have mastered an addition fact, but then later on will seem to have lost it. For the time being, I'm assuming that because they don't have a curriculum any one or all of 3 things has happened:
- they aren't teaching the math facts coherently
- they haven't given him enough distributed practice
- they haven't given him enough massed practice
As to the first, KUMON's worksheets are the ultimate coherent curriculum. The child does many, many worksheets on adding one to a number before moving on to add 2s to a number. KUMON doesn't stop with the within-ten addition facts, either. Instead it takes the child all the way from 1 + 1 to 1000 + 1 before moving on to + 2. Clarice hasn't done that, I don't think. I think she had him learn all the various addition facts up to 10. She said Andrew will seem to have mastered 6 + 4 = 10, but then when they ask him 6 + 4 a week later, he doesn't know. I'm hoping the reason he forgets 6 + 4 is that 6 + 4 doesn't have the meaning it's going to have in KUMON. I'm also wondering whether "massed practice" — aka drill and kill — may be especially important or even critical for developmentally disabled kids. Everyone in the U.S., constructivists & cognitive scientists alike, seems to have decided that distributed practice is the key to the kingdom. (TRAILBLAZERS & EVERYDAY MATH both claim to give children distributed practice.) But I've always found I need to do a certain amount of massed practice in the beginning just to remember a concept well enough to be able to do distributed practice. Andrew is tough to deal with; I bet they haven't made him sit in a chair and do the same addition problems over and over again the way KUMON does. I wouldn't have. In any case, we're moving on to +2 in a couple of days, so at that point I'll start occasionally asking him to do a +1 problem to see if he remembers. We'll see. As to KUMON reading, this morning Andrew was aghast at the discovery that in addition to the 5 KUMON math pages he has to do every day he now has 5 KUMON reading pages, too.
heh
summer school for Christopher First off, I've had my second abject failure in afterschooling books: Sentence Composing for Middle School: A Worktext on Sentence Variety and Maturity by Don Killgallon. I love this book — I even bought the college level one for me — and it's worthless for Christopher. The first exercises ask you to divide a sentence up at its natural breaks. For instance:
The only way to / keep your health is to eat what / you don't want drink / what you don't like and do what you'd / rather not.
- Mark Twain
The student is supposed to rewrite the sentence putting the slashes where they belong. Christopher can't do it. He's so far away from being able to do it that he doesn't even really get what he's supposed to be doing. The whole thing makes no sense to him at all. I thought he'd start to get the hang of it after awhile, but he didn't. He doesn't have an "ear." Some kids do. My friend Kris's little guy, Charlie, has an ear. I went over one day & he came running up to show me something he'd written. He was missing a comma, and when I pointed it out he stopped in his tracks and talked the sentence to himself under his breath, and he heard where the comma was supposed to go. "Oh yeah!" he said, looking happy. My other afterschooling flop was Daily Paragraph Editing, which I was using in 5th grade. I pushed Christopher through pages & pages of that book without his performance improving a jot. Finally I talked to his teacher, the brilliant Ms. Duque, and she said forget it. The book wasn't teaching him anything. I interpret these failures to be more grist for the direct instruction mill. Christopher needs to be directly taught punctuation and grammar. Period. Then he'll have an ear. I think he will, too. We've finished Megawords Book 3, and his ELA teacher, the other Ms. K, has been giving spelling tests all winter and spring. Ms. Duque taught spelling, too. So he's had a lot of spelling. Suddenly, Christopher is using spelling rules to spell words he doesn't know, and he's getting them right, too. Boy is that great. His spelling is so much better, it's amazing. Back in 3rd grade his spelling was A SCANDAL. It was almost psychotically bad, like those jokes about Eastern European languages with no vowels. These days he's starting to have normal not great spelling. In one paragraph of prose he might have two misspelled words, and those words will be misspelled logically. This is why I'm sure he'll develop an "ear." He's developed whatever the analogous form of implicit knowledge is for spelling; he'll do it for writing, too.
vocabulary, writing, math... So we're putting Killgallon on the shelf for the time being. Christopher will do Vocabulary Workshop, a book I like more and more as we go along. He does one page a day, which takes 5 minutes max. VW teaches words in 5 exercises:
- definitions — dictionary definition with sample sentences; student writes the word in the blank
- complete the sentence
- synonyms
- antonyms
- choosing the right word (student chooses which of two words on the vocabulary list "satisfactorily completes" a sentence)
- vocabulary in context — prose passage
There are 15 units in the book, and you review every three units. 20 words per list; 185 pages in the book. Efficient & effective.
We're big on vocabulary these days. At dinner I make Christian and Christopher learn Greek and Latin roots from English from the Roots Up. So far we've learned photos, graph, tele, metron, tropos, philia, phobos (predictable hilarity with metron, which instantly suggests the neologism metronsexual, philia & phobos), syn, and thesis, although Christian is having a horrible time remembering tropos. For quite a while there he was saying "line" whenever he heard it (too long to explain), so "line" has now become a running gag. I told Christian to come up with a mnemonic device for tropos, but unfortunately the one he came up with caused him to start thinking tropos means revolving, which come to think of it maybe it does. (Does it?) If anyone has a suggestion for a mnemonic device that connects tropos to turning, let me know.
I've also got an ancient copy of Word Power Made Easy (a Google Master recommendation, IIRC) next to the dining room table, so we may get to it, too, one of these days. Then last week Martine went out and bought a dictionary of New York slang, and we all learned the meaning of ace boon coon, a phrase Christian knew and had used. I'm having as much trouble remembering ace boon coon as he is remembering tropos (I can't remember the "ace" part), so we'll see who gets to the finish line first.
Christopher is supposed to take his ALEKS placement test today, so I've got to go figure that out. More later.
my boon companion
-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006 Back to main page.
Comments
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Look here for syntax help.
Wow! What a great and amazing story. It must be really hard to have no idea what a kid can do (an understatement, I'm sure). But it sure looks exhilarating to find the things that they can do! -- StephanieO - 25 Jun 2006
When I did the sentence composing book I read the examples the wrong way and then the right way. It's just difficult to understand those sentences with the breaks in the wrong place. I asked him which was the easiest to understand. Only then did he "get" it. Still, I didn't use it too much. Mine needs more direct instruction and practice with things that he resists. Like you, I'm finally seeing results from the Megawords and the Sadlier vocabulary courses. The nice thing about the summer writing course that he's taking is that she is letting them choose their topics. He wrote an expository essay about Pearl Harbor and now he's writing a persuasive essay about why the White Sox are better than the Cubs. He hasn't complained much about this writing class. -- SusanS - 25 Jun 2006
I think "massed practice" is very important in Megan's case. In an article I was reading online about Kumon, it mentioned there is a manual for Kumon instructors working with special needs kids. One of the guidelines mentioned that special needs kids may need even more repetition despite the fact they are within the "standard completion time," and that instructors may want to move on only when the kid can complete the sheets in the minimum completion time. I've seen great improvement w/Meg in her addition facts; before Kumon, she could maybe get 70-75 addition facts right in 5 minutes on the Saxon 54 drill sheets. Now, she finishes 100 in less than 4 minutes. So, at least she can carry on the speed in Kumon to the different format and type face used in Saxon. She just moved on to Level A and takes about 5-6 minutes for 5 sheets. I also love the grammar instruction that comes along with the comprehension/vocabulary in Kumon. 20 pages into Level C1, and Meg learned what an "object" in a sentence is. Of course grammar isn't explicitly taught in school. -- KathyIggy - 25 Jun 2006
Hi Stephanie! It must be really hard to have no idea what a kid can do I think this is one of those cognitive inflexibility areas, where you MUST force yourself to think creatively - AND think creatively in an arena where not only are you not an expert, no one else is, either. For years now I've been standing around in a state of semi-helplessness, basically just assuming that because Andrew can't talk & can't write (physically can't write) there's no way to know whether he understands or not.....which simply can't be true. But it's extremely difficult to figure out how to know-what-Andrew-knows - and obviously his teacher, who does have a lot of experience, is having the same problem. Another thing I've seen: teachers lose their creativity with an individual kid after 3 years. (Another parent formulated this rule, and I think it's true.) Of course, I'm many, many years into this, and my creativity checked out a long time ago.... -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Anyway, I'm constantly trying to give myself a kick in the pants to BRAINSTORM how to figure out what he knows, rather than to give in to the feeling that it's impossible. Thank heavens for KUMON. Not only does the program work, it sparks thoughts. -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Susan Which son is doing VW & MW? Leo, or your little guy? -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Megawords and Vocabulary Workshop are fantastic for Christopher. I'll come back to the Sentence Composing book in a year. I'm going to start Hake this week. -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
oh! your younger son WHERE THE HECK DID YOU FIND A SUMMER WRITING COURSE??? that's what i need -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Actually, that's what I should be offering to kids around here. -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
Kathy wow - that's very exciting topost -- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006
It's Summer School. Love the ole' summer school. It's just preparations for junior high stuff. -- SusanS - 25 Jun 2006
Catherine, I don't know if you ever check out any of the autism blogs. But I found this one: http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/ and it is fascinating. This woman cannot speak, but she writes a very eloquent blog. She is in a wheel chair, requires an aide and was in an institution for a while. Yet she understands and writes about very complicated issues. She writes about facilitated communication which, I believe, is what first helped understand that there was a very intelligent person inside the autistic body. I would be very interested to know what finally helped break her skills loose so that she can write the way she does. -- AnneDwyer - 26 Jun 2006
wait - how does he get to go to summer school?? (or is this Leo?) i'm confused -- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jun 2006
Anne I don't even know the autism blogs! Thanks! Meanwhile....I have to find Brenda's blog....and I don't remember which post she put it on — -- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jun 2006
Our district has summer school for grade/middle school and then one for the high school. They're 4 week deals, although my oldest goes for free to the high school due to special needs. The class is designed to hold off regression of skills (and to help him get familiar with the new school.) -- SusanS - 26 Jun 2006
wow that's amazing do you pay for the classes? -- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jun 2006
We paid for the grade school/junior high ones per class. I'm not paying for the high school one (special ed), but I don't know if others are. They probably are. The high school offers a ton of stuff, academic and otherwise. -- SusanS - 27 Jun 2006
Catherine, Here is an excerpt from an interview on NPR with the woman from the link I gave you. Check out the saying on the T shirt that she wears. Amanda Baggs, 25, has autism. And like some people with autism, she doesn't speak. Instead, she communicates by typing -- with two fingers and fast -- on her keyboard. The computer's voice speaks her words. "We perceive the world differently," says Baggs through a computer. "We think differently. And we respond to the world differently. And that goes for all of us not just some of us." Partly because she doesn't speak, doctors have called her low- functioning. It's a label Baggs says she doesn't put much stock in. "Oh, good grief, yes. The only label I've ever formally gotten is low-functioning," she writes. "I don't believe in functioning levels. High- functioning and low and all that crud is mostly illusions in peoples' heads." Sometimes Baggs wears a T-shirt that says: "Not Being Able to Speak is Not the Same as Not Having Anything to Say." Baggs has a blog where she writes thoughtfully and passionately about autism. "The main theme of the blog," she says, "is that all people are valuable." -- AnneDwyer - 27 Jun 2006
Re: Punctuation and "developing an ear," I wonder if reading along with a book-on-tape would help to do this. You'd hear the rhythm while you saw the punctuation. Recordings would have to be readings rather than performances ... maybe poetry or oratory read by some Distinguished Shakespearian? I'm personally unfamiliar with what might be available, but perhaps your librarian might have some suggestions. -- OldGrouch - 27 Jun 2006
oh - you know, that's a good idea. I hate that term, "low-functioning"! Of course, we need language to convey what "low-functioning" does in fact convey....but that doesn't make me like it any better. Also, the high-functioning/low-functioning opposition denies the bell curve. I used to say my kids were in the great middle class of autism. -- CatherineJohnson - 03 Jul 2006
| WebLogForm | |
|---|---|
| Title: | summer school 2006 |
| TopicType: | WebLog |
| SubjectArea: | AssessmentTests, AutismAndAspergers, KumonProgram, LanguageArts, ParentsTeachingKids, TeachingWriting |
| LogDate: | 200606251456 |