Yesterday we had a meeting with Michael's teacher, speech therapist, counselor and special educator at school to find out how he was doing and to just get an update on his progress. One of the big concerns they find is trying to figure out what he is talking about. Michael assumes that the listener understands what he is saying. He assumes you know all of the people, places and events in his life. His speech teacher asked him, "Michael, what did you do this weekend?" Michael says, "I don't know I don't remember, but I left my snowpants in Trisacy's car but not her car." The speech teacher then spent a half hour trying to decipher the name of the person because of Michael's articulation errors. Then she spent some more time trying to figure out who in the world was this person and why did he leave his snowpants in her car that wasn't her car? She was extremely confused. At the meeting, Chris and I clarified that Tracy and her daughter were living with us because they were homeless, and we were lending our van to Tracy. Michael did leave his snowpants in the red van, and the van does belong to us, Tracy is borrowing it.
All of the teacher's chimed in and reported the same thing. Michael does not have sequencing in order. Structured sequence lessons are just fine. He can put pictures together and tell a story. He cannot apply this sequencing skill to his own life and often has a warped sense of time. The classroom teacher is working on sequencing as well in his writing. She is doing the "four square" method where he puts his ideas down on four different blocks of the paper. This graphic organizer is helping, but he still has a lot of trouble giving that background information that a reader or listener needs to comprehend the story! Chris does not think that Michael thinks in a linear way.
Sometimes these children give incomplete thoughts. This happened a lot with our older son Dale. Dale also had such extreme social awkwardness that he would rather quote phrases from a TV show instead of trying to explain what he was thinking. Out of the blue Dale would say, "She Made Half and English Triffle, and Half a.......Shepard's Pie!" If you didn't know Dale, you would say, "What in the world is he talking about?" Those of us that did know him, knew he was quoting from the TV show FRIENDS. Dale would often blurt out something he had heard on TV. It would feel at times like he was "RainMan".
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| Michael getting mad as he tries to explain something |
How do we get our autistic children to fill us in on the background information? How do we get them to preface the conversation with facts to help us understand their story? How do we get these children to stop being frustrated when we can't understand them? Usually by the second repeating of the story, Michael gets very mad and frustrated. You can see the anger building up on his face. How do we work with these children so that their teachers and friends can understand them? Xander, one of Michael's best friends has said to me, "I don't understand what he is talking about sometimes. I just nod my head and go along with it."
Expressive language and social language is a huge issue with many autistic children. I think it will always be a problem to some degree even after years of speech/language therapy and social skills teaching. How can we make communication easier for these children? What do you do to work on this with your autistic child?
I said in the other post you had, Michael sometimes seems to get frustrated because we don't follow. HE gets it... so why can't we? I suspect it's linked to the same part of his brain that lets him pick up random puzzle pieces and put them together, and how frustrated he gets with us slow ones who have to do the edges first and refer to the pictures. He just KNOWS where they go.
ReplyDeleteHis "internal computer" is just fine, and it processes much faster than most people's. His monitor doesn't display a graphics interface, though... instead, it shows a stream of 0s and 1s that he and a few choice others understand just fine (daddy comes to mind) but that leaves the rest of us shaking our heads in confusion. We need the pretty graphical interface with the icons and ordered file systems to get anything done in OUR "internal computers". He doesn't understand why we'd want to work with something that's so damn slow. :)
If you watch him, too, I think he gets annoyed when we let emotion get in the way of things. He FEELS emotions, enjoys them, loves to hug and snuggle, to comfort, and is fine with expressing happiness, frustration, sadness, grief, love, joy, etc. But when he has something to *do* he's not interested in wasting time on those emotions. Those are for down times. When he's focused on a task, all the peripheral stuff goes away for him. :)