In So Many Words

Getting control of your finances is a common resolution at this time of year, especially for those of us now facing the bills from the holiday season. In 7 Money Rules for Life: How to Take Control of Your Financial Future, Mary Hunt, founder of Debt-Proof Living, offers a common-sense plan for cleaning up a financial mess as well as planning for the future.

Drawing on her own experience, Mary shows how to get out of debt, prioritize where your money is going, and be prepared for the unexpected. Read the rest of my review at 5 Minutes for Books.

The Shadow of Your Smile is the newest offering in the Deep Haven series by Susan May Warren. Although I have read several of the other books in the series, it has been a while and I don’t recall many of the details, so I was glad that this story stood on its own.

Read the rest of my review, and enter to win one of two copies we are giving away, at 5 Minutes for Books.

Also, Susan is celebrating the release of The Shadow of Your Smile by giving away a prize pack worth over $200 from 1/9-1/28. Be sure to click on the image below for more details.

The New Social Story Book, Revised and Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition
Over 150 Social Stories!

by Carol Gray
Future Horizons, 2010
265 pages

About the Book

Social Stories™ provide REAL social understanding! Carol Gray developed the Social Story™ in 1991 to promote social understanding in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Now, nearly twenty years after their inception, Social Stories have become a standard approach for teachers and parents all over the globe, and the stories are more effective than ever!

This 10th Anniversary Edition of The New Social Story™ Book offers over 150 of the most requested Social Stories, each one professionally written by Carol Gray. But it doesn’t end there—Carol also teaches you how to write Social Stories yourself! Years of experience and trial-and-error have led to updated Story guidelines. Carol explains her fine-tuned process in the included ten-step learning module The Social Story™ 10.1 Tutorials—perfect for parents and teachers!

INSIDE ARE GEMS SUCH AS:

• Mistakes Can Happen on a Good Day
• It Was Fun but Now We’re Done
• When It Is My Turn to Listen
• Saying What I Think with Respect
• Learning to Respond to Bullying
• Telling My Teacher about a Problem
• Fire Drills at School
• Moving to a New Home
• Children Grow Kind Of Slow
• The Truth about Messes
• This Place is Busy
• and DOZENS MORE!

PLUS, to jump-start your story-writing journey, this book comes with a CD containing each Social Story in ready-to-print PDFs AND easy-to-edit Word files! With the CD, you can customize story content and insert images relevant to your child or student’s individual experiences. An invaluable bonus!

My Thoughts

I can’t tell you how fast I jumped at the opportunity to review this book! I have loved Carol Gray and Social Stories for years and am so thankful for teachers and therapists who have helped me write stories for my son on a variety of topics.

With these resource, I can definitely take it to the next level. Not only can I use the stories in the book as they are, I can also modify them for specific situations using the included CD, or I can follow the 10-step tutorial in the beginning of the book to write my own custom social stories.

My son and I have actually read sections of it as part of our bedtime routine and have been able to refer back to them when we encounter a challenging event during the day. Just recently, he has been having more difficulty with handling games, and I was able to print out the relevant stories to be read before games are played both at school and at home. Such an incredible tool to have at hand when it is needed!

Discount Opportunity: If you order The New Social Story Book directly from Future Horizons, you can use the code INTERRUPTED to receive 15% off and free shipping in the continental US.

Note: I received a review copy of this book for free, but all opinions are my own. I am an affiliate of Future Horizons and receive a small amount of compensation for any sales made using the promotional code provided. You can use the code INTERRUPTED when ordering books or other materials – or even conference registrations – to receive 15% off plus free shipping in the continental US.

Acceptance. Forgiveness. Grace. Profound topics that are deftly woven into this powerful short novel about a man searching for the truth.

In The Encounter, teaching pastor Stephen Arterburn introduces us to the character of Jonathan Rush. Jonathan is a successful entrepreneur with a much less successful personal life, and he has come to Fairbanks, Alaska on the advice of his counselor. His task–to find out as much as he can about the mother who gave him up as a young boy.

Read the rest of my review at 5 Minutes for Books.

Thank you to all of those who commented on my New Year’s post. I appreciate you all so much!

I actually ended my year with a fun-filled trip to the vet, complete with cats escaping from the carrier before I could get them out to the car and lugging said carrier with 27 lbs of cat inside into the building for their exams.

We were there quite a while, and after much exploration, Wallace and Willow found an empty cabinet that they seemed to like! (Sorry about all the shadows; I am not much of a camera person and this was on my itouch anyway.)

Michael started the year with a new reward menu at school. We have increased the time it takes to earn a checkmark from six minutes to ten, but we also cut the point value of all rewards in half and added some new rewards that he seems quite excited about.

One of the new options is to help with the morning announcements, and he spent a good chunk of the week earning this. He was so excited about it, and he did a great job! The first picture is of Michael reading the opening lines before turning it over to one of the seasoned vets, and the second is all three of the kids saying in unison, “Let’s all be Paxtang Proud!”

Autism and Reading Comprehension
Ready-to-Use Lesson Plans for Teachers

by Joseph Porter, M.Ed.
Future Horizons, 2011
394 pages

About the Book

The predictable format, repetition, and routine of these lessons will create a relaxed learning environment, while the variations in the topics will hold students’ attention and help them generalize the reading skills they need to succeed!

Starting with Level 1 (The Cat) and ending with Level 9 (The Lizard), special-educator Joseph Porter has developed an amazing 90 hours of animal-themed, whole-group instruction. There are two student worksheets for each of nine animals, totaling eighteen worksheets. Each worksheet has four variations, and there is a ready-to-go lesson plan for each one!

There are also two sentence-building exercises for each animal theme, which will build students’ observation skills and help them transform those skills into conversation and written language. In addition to the step-by-step lesson plans, Joseph provides a detailed description of what the lessons will look and feel like in the classroom, complete with valuable, first-hand advice. In the back, you’ll find an appendix with numerous suggestions for complementary activities for each animal theme, so you can supplement on the “off” days with art projects, music, books, and videos.

There is even a section containing Data-Collection Sheets, assessment forms that will help you record students’ progress, per IEP standards. And the companion CD contains all of the worksheets, lesson plans, visual tools, and assessment forms for quick-and-easy print!

My Thoughts

This is an incredibly detailed curriculum, with explicit instructions for how to implement every aspect of the program. The worksheets combine both coloring and writing, mostly filling in the blank or copying a sentence, and they offer lots of practice on following directions as well. There are also several different graphic sentence-building tools that can be used as the students gain confidence and skill.

The book also includes an easy-to-use CD containing printable lesson plans, worksheets, visual tools, and assessment and data collection forms. This program would definitely be most appropriate for beginning readers at the elementary school level.

I like that Porter recognizes real-world limitations and presents lessons suitable for small group instruction rather than only one-on-one interactions. I also greatly appreciate his understanding that comprehension – whether in reading or in conversation – is about having an active relationship with the words that goes beyond simple recognition of basic meaning.

Discount Opportunity: If you order Autism & Reading Comprehension directly from Future Horizons, you can use the code INTERRUPTED to receive 15% off and free shipping in the continental US.

Note: I received a review copy of this book for free, but all opinions are my own. I am an affiliate of Future Horizons and receive a small amount of compensation for any sales made using the promotional code provided. You can use the code INTERRUPTED when ordering books or other materials – or even conference registrations – to receive 15% off plus free shipping in the continental US.

Taken from the article “Social Anxiety and Social Skill Competencies” by Michelle Garcia Winner, Autism Asperger’s Digest, www.autismdigest.com

Note: This is Part II of the article; click here for Part I, where Michelle outlines the key strategies she teaches for reducing social anxiety. I think the visuals are great – they remind me of what some of my favorite Aspie bloggers refer to as “loops”!

The Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure
Visual representations are strong—and welcomed—tools in helping our students understand the interrelationships that exist in social thinking and social processing. To help our students understand the concepts outlined in this article, I developed two graphic representations of the thought processes used in working through social situations. The Spiral of Social Success summarizes these concepts:

• You will encounter some stress approaching this situation. In the past your anxiety would prompt you to bail out of this situation. Instead of starting by doubting yourself, explore what strategies you can use to help yourself deal with the uncomfortable social situation.
• Use your inner coach to remind yourself how much better you will feel once you use your strategies—that you are capable of using these strategies as well as choosing specific strategies to use.
• You feel better about yourself when you are demonstrating your abilities or social competencies.
• This encourages you to use the strategies.
• In doing so, you are training your brain that “you can do it” better than you have done it before!

Conversely, the Spiral of Social Failure illustrates what happens when our clients fail to embrace their social-learning–social-anxiety reducing strategies:

• You encounter the same stressful situation, one you previously avoided.
• Your anxiety prompts you to think of excuses for why you won’t engage in this situation today.
• Your self-defeater voice assures you that you can’t do it and that you have never been able to do it.
• You have negative emotions about your inability to get through this situation.
• You avoid putting yourself in the situation.
• You teach your brain one more time that you cannot do it! Your memory now reflects your inability and your self-defeater voice grows stronger.

The purpose of the Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure was to help our students understand how best to place the strategies they were learning in the context of their own functioning.

Our students helped us adjust the spirals so the wording more clearly matched their own experiences and emphasized how they related to the content of each spiral. This visual presentation paired with lessons that taught them the key concepts outlined in the graphics—increased accountability, self-learning, letting go of excuses, and embracing change—led to some very positive results.

They discovered they could choose positive behavioral responses to anxiety-laden situations and retrain their brains to learn new ways of acting and reacting. While the situations still caused anxiety, our clients gained confidence in attempting to push through their anxiety, further reinforced by the success they could achieve within the interaction. However, this learning process takes time. It may take years to help our students, through active learning of these strategies, to get them onto the Spiral of Social Success.

Some level of anxiety is inherent in every social situation we encounter. This set of strategies does not offer a cure for the anxiety experienced by individuals with social learning challenges. However, it can help minimize some of the anxiety by helping our students better appreciate how anxiety affects us and giving our students a toolbox of options to use when anxiety arises.

Such coping strategies are beneficial—not just for individuals with social learning challenges, but for us all!

Michelle Garcia Winner is the founder of Social Thinking®. She works in her clinic in San Jose, CA, has written numerous books, and speaks internationally. Visit her website, www.socialthinking.com, for more information.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Taken from the article “Social Anxiety and Social Skill Competencies” by Michelle Garcia Winner, Autism Asperger’s Digest, www.autismdigest.com

Note: Because this article is fairly long, I have broken it up into two parts. In Part I, Michelle outlines the key strategies she teaches for reducing social anxiety. I so appreciate her outlook on the responsibility of each individual to take ownership for what we need and want to improve in our social lives.

My goal was to find a way to help our clients decrease anxiety while increasing their social competencies. The result was a treatment strategy called the Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure.

I developed this approach for high-level teens and young adults who had first developed social competencies and were now ready to explore social anxiety. We discovered this teaching strategy helped motivate them to challenge their anxiety by giving them alternative strategies to use when stressed by specific social situations. An overview of the social concepts we shared with clients, as well as the description of the spirals, follows.

Social anxiety has deep tentacles; once it disrupts our functioning it likes to keep that power in place! Once it inhabits a person, anxiety will not go away without a fight. This means as our students recognize they have increased social competencies, they have to actively work at reducing their anxiety. This involves learned strategies, as well as their own shift in perception in making a choice in the moment: are you going to default to anxiety or use your strategies?

Some of the key social learning–social anxiety reduction strategies we teach our clients include:

1. Take ownership; be personally accountable for what you need to learn. After many years of working with adolescents, I realized that while I understood they had social learning differences, as long as I prompted them to use their strategies, I was the one taking ownership of their problems. Now I realize that as I teach them these strategies, they have to work at using them, which first means they have to realize these strategies are theirs and not ours (the teachers and parents).
2. Accept that your job is to become more comfortable with social discomfort. The neurotypical teen and adult world is filled with social discomfort. Using strategies does not mean our clients won’t feel discomfort. Their job is to work at learning how to be comfortable with the fact they will be uncomfortable socially at times! The mentor’s job is to encourage the client to use the treatment strategies even when experiencing discomfort.
3. Recognize and celebrate the small steps of progress being made. We need to help our students feel intrinsically proud of themselves for their progress. Avoid using token rewards for progress as these provide extrinsic but not intrinsic motivation.
4. Use your inner coach, rather than your self-defeater voice, inside your head. You and I use an “inner coach” or “private voice” in our heads to encourage and motivate ourselves through difficulties. Our inner coach may say to us: “You can do this!” “Just do it and get it over with!” “Remember last time this wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be, so just go do it!”
   Unfortunately, many of our students have a “self-defeater” voice in their heads. This voice discourages rather than encourages: “You’re bad at this.” “You’ve never been able to do this, so you won’t be able to do it now.” Individuals who have a loud self-defeater voice in their heads will default to avoiding the uncomfortable task at hand; those with an inner coach have a far better chance of pushing themselves through the uncomfortable task. We need to help our students be realistic about their strengths and challenges while reinforcing their choice to use their inner coach as much as possible.
5. Stop making excuses for avoiding social encounters. Those with strong self-defeater voices tend to find a lot of benign excuses for avoiding the task at hand. Many of our students don’t recognize that what they are saying is, in fact, an excuse for not pushing themselves through an uncomfortable moment. Instead, they automatically default to their excuses.
   Our strategy is to explore the personal excuses they make as we assign them tasks that provide opportunities to practice social competencies and use their anxiety-reducing strategies. Once students begin to notice and then take ownership of the fact they are making excuses, they further progress.
6. Your brain always learns; whether it learns positive or negative ways to cope, it is always learning! We discuss how our brains are always learning, all the time, that anytime we are awake we are learning from our experiences. If we “default” to what we are accustomed to doing, we constantly teach our brains we can only do it the way we have done it before. If students want to teach their brain a new set of skills, they have to try to do things differently.
   This idea may seem elementary, but it can be difficult for our concrete-thinking, rule-bound students to change the way they do things, especially their thinking patterns. I often ask them a direct question: “Do you want to teach your brain you can’t do something, or do you want to teach your brain you can do something?” Hopefully their answer is a “can-do” response, and we circle back to our other strategies to help them retrain their brain.

Watch for Part II of this guest article tomorrow, where Michelle illustrates her spirals of social success and social failure.

Michelle Garcia Winner is the founder of Social Thinking®. She works in her clinic in San Jose, CA, has written numerous books, and speaks internationally. Visit her website, www.socialthinking.com, for more information.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Yes, you read the title right — this post is about a revelation, not a resolution. I am not making any resolutions this year, but I do want to tell you something. This will probably be a long post, so I hope you’ll stick with me to the end.

For those of you that would rather go straight to the bottom line, here it is: I have recently been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Before I elaborate on that, I want to say that I know there are people who will question the validity of the diagnosis and even disparage me for seeking it in the first place, and I’m sure there are others who will be moved to pity or sadness for me. But I am hopeful that there are more who will be supportive and encouraging of my journey, and possibly even a few who will be encouraged by me in some way.

You may be wondering what has brought me to this point in my life. (At least I hope you are, because I am getting ready to tell you anyway!)

It’s sort of ironic that my son was diagnosed with autism in December of 2004, but I didn’t really consider that it might apply to me until October 2010, when I attended a conference with Dr. Tony Attwood. During that session, he spent a significant portion of his time talking about girls and Asperger’s. As he described what might be the day in the life of a teenage girl with Asperger’s, I felt like he was describing my own life in vivid color. I didn’t realize until he was almost done that I was actually crying.

I went home and didn’t say anything to anyone right away about the experience, sort of pondering things in my heart, so to speak. When I did write up my notes from the conference, my husband read them and immediately asked if I thought I might have AS. We both felt this made a lot of sense, but I still wasn’t sure. My biggest question really had to do with the issue of nature versus nurture; i.e. could all of my differences and challenges be explained by the way I grew up, or was the answer more intrinsically related to how I am.

After tossing this idea around and around with my therapist and a few Aspie bloggers I connected with, I finally decided it would be best to get an evaluation with professionals who are experienced in this area, so I went to a nearby autism center.

Over the course of a few months, I met with two different psychologists and a psychiatrist at the center, all of whom agreed that I do qualify for a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome (in addition to depression, currently in remission, and anxiety – both extremely common comorbid conditions for people on the spectrum, especially those diagnosed later in life).

It has been almost two months since the feedback session at the autism center, and I have begun to realize that receiving the diagnosis is not simply the end of the process of looking for an answer, but is really a beginning to the process of changing the way I view myself and seeing all the opportunities I have to make my life what I want it to be.

So many things that seemed completely out of reach in the past may now be possible if I take a different approach. Or I may decide that those things aren’t actually what I want, but are just what I thought I was supposed to want. Of course, there are many things that I don’t want to do, but have to because they are part of life, but at least I don’t have to beat myself up for finding them difficult.

Before hearing the diagnosis, I had only shared my thoughts about it in real life with my husband, my therapist, and two friends. Each of these conversations was incredibly difficult, primarily because of a huge fear of ridicule and/or rejection.

Since the diagnosis, I have told a few more people, including my boss and my son, and those encounters have gone fairly well. Because I write about autism and related topics on my blog, however, I knew that this new information would begin to color my posts and I feel it is worth the risk to share the information here in the hopes that I will find even more support and also that it may help someone else who is struggling.

In reflecting on my experiences as a blogger, I re-read my very first post, entitled Where to start?, and found it to be extremely revealing regarding aspects of my personality and also quite appropriate to how I feel at the beginning of this new part of my life. I hope you’ll indulge me if I re-post part of it here:

I feel like my whole life has been spent trying to figure out all the answers and the right way to do something before I even put the first two pieces together. In my head, I realize you have to put yourself out there and do the best you can, but the rest of me always tries to pull back to safety. So, although it may not seem like a big step to most people, I am starting this venture without having read up on all the technical aspects of blogging or even the social/etiquette rules of the blog world. I am going to learn as I go along.

If you’ve made it this far, I would like to say thank you for reading this very long and self-centered post. I appreciate all of those who have supported and encouraged me to this point and hope you all have a very Happy and Blessed New Year!

So, now it’s your turn. Questions? Comments?

Last year, I started keeping a list on my blog of all the books I had read; I got up to 123 in all for 2011. This year I’m going to list them by category rather than numbering them, but it will still be interesting to see what the final total is.

Click on any title to view it on Amazon.com. If I’ve posted a review of the book somewhere online, I will link to that as well.

General Fiction

• Long Drive Home by Will Allison – my review

Christian Fiction

• The Shadow of Your Smile (Deep Haven) by Susan May Warren – my review
• Chasing Mona Lisa by Tricia Goyer & Mike Yorkey – my review
• Longing (Bailey Flanigan, Book 3) by Karen Kingsbury

Detective Novels/Mysteries

• Gun Games by Faye Kellerman

Science Fiction & Fantasy

• Beauty and the Werewolf (Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Book 6) by Mercedes Lackey – my review

General Nonfiction

• 7 Money Rules for Life®: How to Take Control of Your Financial Future by Mary Hunt – my review
• Four Letter Words: Conversations on Faith’s Beauty and Logic by Bill Giovannetti – my review
• Mornings with Jesus 2012, compiled by Guideposts – my review

Autism Resources

• Autism and Reading Comprehension: Ready-to-use Lessons for Teachers by Joseph Porter – my review
• The New Social Story Book, Revised and Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition by Carol Gray – my review
• Exploring Feelings: Anxiety by Tony Attwood – my review
• Special Diets for Special Kids, Volumes 1 and 2 Combined by Lisa Lewis – my review
• Asperger Awareness: A Key To Success For IT And Technical Managers by Stephen Plowright – my review