In So Many Words

Michael in June 2004 with the ubiquitous video cover

Conventional wisdom tells us that we shouldn’t let our kids spend too much time in front of a TV screen, or any screen, for that matter. And while that may be true, it is also true that having a kid with autism can cause you to turn a lot of conventions on their heads.

One of the things I was told early on by my son’s therapists and special education teachers was to use his particular interests to motivate him to do or learn other things that he wasn’t particularly interested in. This could range from offering access to a preferred activity as a reward for completing some other task to using materials related to a specific interest to make schoolwork such as reading or math more enjoyable.

I also learned a lot about the importance of tools such as picture schedules and social stories because of how much easier it is for my son to process information presented in a visual format. At some point along the way, I realized that I should be taking advantage of his strong preference for videos and other electronic media rather than simply lamenting how hard it was to engage him in other ways.

This has looked different as time went on.

It started out as simply as encouraging him to stand up when Dora the Explorer told him to, and answering Steve or Joe when they asked what Blue could want to do with the clues she had found, rather than passively watching the shows with no interaction.

Later on, we spent hours on the PBS and Nick Jr. websites playing games with his favorite characters and then printing out coloring sheets so Mommy could cut out the characters to play with. Eventually, this turned into learning how to look up information on each new show, and later video game, that he became interested in. (I know more than any 41-year-old woman should about Power Rangers, Ben 10, Mario and Sonic, and he knows way more about researching a topic than I ever did at the age of 9!)

We have also explored electronic media designed for therapeutic use, such as the well-loved and much-watched DVD Let’s Go To! from Special Kids Network, the iEarned That app which replaced a physical reward chart and the use of video modeling by the psychologist who runs his playgroup.

Most recently, I have discovered the power of ebooks. Although my son greatly enjoys being read to, he tends to shun longer stories and hasn’t developed the love of books that I had as a child. I have continued to hope this would eventually happen for him and had my first glimpse of it the other day when we found, by chance, a free copy of Stick Dog Wants a Hamburger on iBooks.

We read the entire book that day and he immediately wanted to purchase the second book in the series, Stick Dog Wants a Frankfurter. When I declared that my voice was worn out for the day, he proceeded to read over 10 pages aloud by himself before deciding to take a break from the story. We finished it the next day and he is eagerly waiting more Stick Dog adventures.

It had never occurred to me before that day to look towards electronic media to encourage my son to develop more of an interest in books, perhaps because I haven’t gotten used to them myself, so this was definitely a revelation that yet more frontiers await exploration. (And I haven’t even mentioned that we are going to be working on keyboarding skills so that he can take advantage of the opportunity to type assignments for school rather than having to do so much handwriting – a post for another day, perhaps.)

All of this is not to say that he hasn’t had his fair share of overindulgence in TV or video games, but I guess what I am saying is that the best way to engage your child is to enter their world and look at things from their perspective sometimes. For my son, that meant (and still means) figuring out what is so appealing to him about the media that he enjoys and finding a way to incorporate that into the rest of his life.

Note: This post was written for the Best of the Best, Edition 7: Media and Kids with Special Needs. Please check it out to read viewpoints from other bloggers on this topic.

One More Note: I actually realized in looking at the related posts generated here that I have written about this very topic almost three years ago for one of my Try This Tuesday posts at 5 Minutes for Special Needs. If you’re interested, the post was Using Videos as Instructional Tools.

We hear a lot about various aspects of autism being “invisible.” I don’t think it’s so much that people can’t see certain issues or difficulties a person is having, but more that they assume these things are not related to the disability. Instead, they may simply see a person who “isn’t trying hard enough” or is being “lazy,” “non-compliant” or some other term that places a value judgment on the person rather than seeing someone who is doing the best they can within their current situation.

One example of an “invisible” special need is difficulty with organizational skills. Organizational skills is an extremely broad category, but I wanted to share today one specific area that we have implemented with my son to help with the pack-up routine at school.

The Pack-Up “Problem”
Packing up at the end of a day at school was not an issue at all in kindergarten or first grade for my son. I believe this is because the teachers had extremely clear routines in place and were very hands-on in making sure the children were all following the same routine and not missing any steps. There was also a very clear distinction between what you did when you came in each morning and what you did at the end of the day.

When Michael entered second grade, things began to go downhill with regard to getting out of school in a reasonable timeframe and with all of the proper papers, books and other items. He was often one of the last students to exit the building and rarely had everything he was supposed to have in his backpack. There were missing assignment papers, missing journal books and even missing papers that I was supposed to be filling out and sending back in.

Interestingly enough, one of the new responsibilities for second grade was for each student to copy down the homework assignments into a planner. The teacher checked and initialed each student’s planner every day to ensure it had been done correctly, which was a great relief to me (at least I knew which assignments we weren’t getting done!); however, she placed the responsibility for the other items that needed to be packed up on the students.

I mentioned this issue to my son’s case manager during the first or second week of school, and she felt that we should give him some time to see if he would get into the routine on his own. I wasn’t so sure her optimism was well-founded but decided to allow the wait-and-see approach for a short time.

When “Giving Him Time to Settle In” Didn’t Solve the Problem (What? You thought that would be all he needed too?)
Once my request for a written pack-up routine had been rejected dismissed addressed, I decided to start some data collection on this problem. Each day, I kept track of what was missing from his backpack, as far as I could tell, and waited to see if things would improve.

After the first month of school, I had only seen everything come home 3-4 times, so I brought up the issue again with the team. Faced with a written record of what had been occurring over the past few weeks, they agreed to create a visual checklist for him to use.

As they began to create the checklist, they realized that, although the morning routine was very consistent day to day, the specifics of what to put in his backpack at the end of the day would vary based on what type of homework he had and other variables such as whether they had had library that day. So they came up with a checklist for the afternoon routine that was actually a series of questions designed to help him figure out what he needed to pack up properly on a given day.

I was actually quite impressed with this way of designing the checklist, as it goes beyond simply supporting his need for being organized enough to bring the right things home and actually supports him in thought process behind the organization.

Here are screenshots of the morning and afternoon routine so you can see what they look like:

Morning Routine

Afternoon Routine

(For those who may be wondering, FISH means For Information Sent Home, and the FISH folder only comes home at the end of each week.)

The Outcome
Since the checklist has been implemented, there have only been 1-2 days in four months when Michael did not have everything he needed to do his homework, which makes me happy if not him, LOL!

For those interested in reading more on this topic, here are a few online resources I found on the topic of organizational skills:
National Association for Gifted Children – Organization Skills
Autism Support Network – Teaching Organizational Skills
Homework and Beyond: Teaching Organizational Skills to Individuals with ASD by Michelle Garcia Winner

I just got the graph from the learning support teacher showing Michael’s timeouts from March. He currently gets a timeout only for yelling or screaming and for any aggressive actions (hitting, kicking or throwing things). Outside of these, he is prompted toward the desired behavior and positive behavior is reinforced through a visual token system.

This had been working quite well for a while, although lately the timeouts have been gradually increasing in frequency and it was discovered after a recent series of aggressive episodes that the reinforcement scheduled had been thinned considerably because of how well he was doing.

Oh, beware the words “well” and “fine,” I tell you – they’ll get you every time!

He attended 20 days of school from March 3rd to 31st (not sure why the 1st and 2nd aren’t on the graph) and had a total of 10 timeouts.

• 13 days with no timeouts
• 4 days with 1 timeout
• 3 days with 2 timeouts

The most days in a row with a timeout was 2; whereas the most days in a row without a timeout was 9. So what was different about those 9 days in a row?

Simple – we increased the positive reinforcement.

Yep, we upped the visual reinforcement back to its original level on March 15th and then had 9 days without a timeout. In fact, even after that, he only had three timeouts the rest of the month, and one of those was on a day when he had been on a study trip. He had done an amazingly fantastic job through the entire day to that point, but just couldn’t recover from being upset when he got out during a spelling game due to mis-hearing the word that was asked.

I have quoted this before, but it’s still so true:

The power of positive reinforcement is the most under-utilized tool we have.
~ Peter Gerhardt, Organization for Autism Research

In fact, our autism consultant has introduced another visual reinforcement schedule, which is set up like a game and based on Super Mario Bros, that specifically targets his behaviors during competitive situations. At least for now, it is motivating enough to help mitigate the negative feelings he has when he doesn’t win or isn’t the first or best one in an activity. (I’ll see if I can get a copy of it to post here; they keep the book at school.)

Have you found this to be true for your child? What motivates them even when the emotional stakes are high?

The regular students in my son’s first grade classroom have to complete a think sheet if they pull all four of their cards in one day, so when we created my son’s behavior plan, we wanted to include a think sheet for use after a timeout (timeouts are for yelling or physical aggression only at this point).

His OT created one just for him. I wasn’t sure what it would look like and how much writing would be involved, so I was very pleasantly surprised when I saw that it was mostly circling things. She used emoticons for the emotions and other colorful icons to illustrate the other areas, and it has worked beautifully.

I scanned one of the think sheets so you could see it – sorry it’s not a better image.

A couple of notes:

• Stop and Think is something the speech teacher uses with all the kids.
• Park It is something we pulled from the training world and included in his behavior plan. It basically means that when you have a question or comment that is inappropriate for a particular time, it can be written down and addressed by the proper person later. Sometimes that’s the teacher and other times it comes home to me. We have it right on his communication sheet. I’m not sure if I’ve posted about that before, but I’ll try to scan a copy of that for a future post.

Michael has even asked to fill the think sheets out when he goes to his quiet space because of being upset about something (that is not the same as a timeout, just a place for when he is overwhelmed or starting to get out of sorts). The OT has encouraged this because it will help him become more aware of how he is feeling before he gets out of control.

We have been following the new behavior plan for one month now, so I am emailing the team to get their feedback and ask for the numbers on how many timeouts there were for each thing. But I know they are pleased with his progress overall, as well as relieved that the new TSS is so much better.

If anyone would like a copy of the Word document, just email me or leave a comment below requesting it and I will email it to you.

This post was written for the Steady Mom 30-Minute Blog Challenge I would encourage to check out the other posts and also the Steady Mom site as there are some great changes happening over there.

The last couple of weeks I have been sharing about some of the ideas that came out of our recent team meeting at Michael’s school for Try This Tuesday:

• TTT#16: Micro Schedules
• TTT#17: Brainstorming

I am still hoping to expand this column to include more of our readers’ ideas and even their challenges that they need some ideas for. For anyone who may be interested in sharing something they found to be helpful with their child who has special needs, or who has an issue they are needing some input on, please get in touch with me at trish[at]anotherpieceofthepuzzle[dot]com or through my contact form.

If you are sharing an idea, I would like for you to write the post, but if you are asking for help, you could either write it yourself or I could just share the details, with or without identifying who you are.

I would also like to say to my regular readers that I know I have still been largely out of touch and I apologize. I even wrote out a post about how stressed I am while sitting in the waiting room at the psychologist’s office today but didn’t get time to type it up due to all the other things I had to take care of today. Plus it sounded really whiny, even to me!

I have no intention of disappearing but ask for grace as I deal with some of the stuff I am dealing with right now. Your kind thoughts and prayers mean more than you can know.

If you’re interested in seeing what Michael’s visual schedule for kindergarten looks like, I have it posted over at 5 Minutes for Special Needs today.

He likes it so much that I pulled out the whiteboard we have with the days of the week on it to write out our schedule for this week. We had gotten out of the habit of using it over the summer, but now that we have different activities in the mornings, it was really needed again.

We have another wonderful guest poster for this week’s Try This Tuesday at 5MFSN. PsychMamma is sharing a great idea for extending the use of all the photos that come with holiday greetings from friends and family.

For all the details, check out Try This Tuesday: Educational Picture Ring.

Wow, less than a week until kindergarten starts! Michael is a bit nervous about it; he has been doing his little hair twirling thing for the last few days, and I haven’t noticed that since he finished preschool in June.

Pop on over to 5 Minutes for Special Needs to see one strategy I implemented to help him get ready for this new adventure.

My son has always loved watching videos, so I started looking for ways to use them as teaching tools. Read more about it in this week’s Try This Tuesday post at 5 Minutes for Special Needs.

This is a bit of a catch-up post, since I keep thinking of all the things I have been meaning to share but haven’t gotten to yet.  ‘Tis a bit long as well; my apologies – it was either this or four shorter posts and that would overwhelm even me!

First, the Wordle

The image at the top of this post is called a Wordle – have you seen these yet? They are very fun to play around with; you just enter some text or a URL with a feed and it creates a word cloud. Then you can play around with the font, colors and the layout until you get it how you like it. Yes, I know there’s no real reason for me to make one, but they are fun!

The Timer Revisited

I posted earlier at 5 Minutes for Special Needs about using a timer, and I wanted to also share a way that the staff at Michael’s summer program are using it with him.

When he is called to an activity such as art time and refuses to come, the staff, instead of arguing or giving a timeout, will simply tell him they are starting the timer. The timer is started and not stopped until he joins the activity. Then when free play starts, the staff member tells my son, “Oh, you owe me [x number] minutes of art time before you can start playing.”

The best part is that it’s working.   Now when they say they will start the timer if he doesn’t come, he will often say, “No, not the timer!” and come right away.

Root and Sprout

Root and Sprout is a website dedicated to supporting moms and dads in providing “gentle, hands-on parenting” to their children.  New articles are published monthly, and the August Edition is now up.  Yours truly actually wrote one of the articles this month and am honored to have it accepted and published in the Wildflowers section.  If you scroll down, it is the second article. (Wait, what I meant to say was read the first article and then you will get to mine!)
Updated to add: Root & Sprout is now using a blogging platform so that each article has a permalink and you no longer have to scroll through each section.

Feel free to explore the other sections and consider submitting an article yourself.  It is a fairly painless procedure and the editor doesn’t bite (well, not that I am aware of, anyway!)

And Finally

Phew!  I am so happy to have all of that off my brain!  I need to clear the space because tomorrow will be my first day at the Penn State National Autism Conference. I wasn’t able to attend today’s opening sessions, but am all registered and ready to go in the morning.

Tomorrow I am scheduled for Asperger Syndrome: Strategies for Young Children in the morning.  This session deals primarily with self-regulation and social/emotional competence; I am figuring that Michael is high-functioning enough that a lot of this should apply to him, and if not I am sure I could use some help in this area.  My afternoon session is Strategies for Successful Inclusion of Learners with ASDs.  It is directed at teachers, but hopefully there will be some things I can offer to the team as we move forward.

To anyone who made it all the way to the bottom of this post, I really appreciate you!!