F&Z's top parenting tip for the week

[FrannyandZooey]

This has worked wonders for me to get my 3 y o to remember how to do certain things. I have made a list and stuck it up on the wall in the toilet (has just started using toilet independently but forgets all the things he is meant to do). He can't read so I have drawn pictures next to the different items which are:

wipe yourself (drawing of toilet roll)
pull up your pants and trousers
put the seat down
wash your hands
shut the door (nb yes I am a bit anal about this but otherwise it is left wide open and blocks out all the light into the hall)

This has been very effective for us this week and he is proud that he can 'read' the list and remember what to do. I think it could work well for other jobs such as room tidying, getting ready to go out etc (put on your shoes, go to the loo, get your coat and so on). Am now wondering if it would work for dps....

Fio

Thats not very nice, come on now.

Cor, Fio, bit strong

LOL I reckon Fio fancies me

she doesn't know quite how to tell me so instead she follows me from thread to thread throwing insults at me

what's this about brown sauce?
is it something rude?
or some sort of sexual rhyming slang:

brown sauce = riding the horse

I think it was a reference to FAZ's dinner with IL's thread.

Have I missed something?

It was on my thread about my PILs discussing their bowel habits at top volume in a restaurant

it was suggested that was not embarrassing enough to merit a thread so I pointed out they also asked for brown sauce

obviously touched a nerve with young Fio

Oh yes, I remember that thread.

I thought it was very funny

I know, I could hear you laughing from here

To return to the orginal post somewhat ... jimjams.. no the school is woefully inadequate and I am really giong to have to do something about it. Trouble is its mainstream and ds is really the only one with special needs. I feel that he has to work his way round them rather than them working round him. For example he is was being disruptive last week and throwing chairs around. I was called in and I tried to settle him and asked them to get his table and chair again and they go and fetch 6 chairs (6 FFS!) so of course he starts throwing them around. This is a temporary teacher but even so how can they be so thick! He's generally OK with his classroom teacher but it seems like I willhave to go in there and sort everything out. (sigh) the social stories will help with this too. sorry to hijack thread.

oh no that's difficult. I do know what you mean- when ds1 spent his 4 terms in mainstream no-one in the school was PECS trained, I was, would see them doing something wrong, would then have to ring up the SALT and say "look they're doing this" she'd say "oh dear, I'll speak to them" and then she'd ring them and sort it out (and no they wouldn't take it from me- despite having gone on the 2 day training workshop and a 1 day pecs throughout the day workshop!) DS1 was always expected to somehow magically fit in with the NT kids as well it was a joke.

I'm guessing you're fairly rural and don't have many other options. Also as he's high functioning they're just not going to understand the use of visual strategies unless you show them how well it works. Do you have egg timers etc for countdowns? Oh somewhere there's a clever clock you can make as well, whch can work well as a visual reinforcer of how much time left foor an activity..... Let me search

here we are Different Roads to Learning are US based, but very good, I've ordered stuff from them before- Davros uses them all the time.

eulalia the complete visual reinforcement system might be worht loking at- although you can make your own. Lots of token economy systems- so you have an "i am working for" card- you put the pic of the reward on there, then you earn tokens - different cards have different numbers of tokens before you get the reward. Helps with school stuff in particular. You can buy that in the UK though- from pyramid which I think was my first link on this thread (they may have clockes as well).

Thanks so much jimjams. I did hear about the time clock thing from our autism advisory lady but have lost the info she gave me. She was great (Scottish Society for Autism) - she came to our house and worked through several of our problems and offered strategies. Also had a visit from a psychiatric nurse and she is coming to do some actual work with ds himself.

It is coming together slowly but the school needs more support and if I need to do myself then so be it. So much of this help has taken literally years to channel through the system. He seems to need a lot of support now, don't know if its just an age thing/more awareness causing difficulties... Anyway I didn't really appreciate how much the visual stuff would help even with a very verbal child like him.

Yes the school is rural but we have 2 bigger schools within a taxi ride away - t hey have special needs units, but not keen on taking him out of his school and the people he knows as they obviously all live in our village (hope is some day he may be able to form some kind of friendship with them)

I am glad this thread sparked off something useful for you Eulalia. Good luck getting some more help for your ds.

Does he have his own LSA Eulalia- I know the system is different over the border, so not sure how that all works out. The other thing really is to make sure that he has his own workstation (even if he has another regular place at a table with classmates). That can be blocked off (like a Teacch bay- here's an example - the red thing giives the visual timetable and the one on the left shows a few visual cues on the wall- could make much more of it than that but it gives the idea). They did make quite a good workstation for ds1 in ms. He had a communication board and a visual timetable (different one for am and pm) and he removed each symbol as it was completed and put in the attached pouch. Like the one in the picture his faced the wall to cut out distractions.

Another thought - could he do outreach to the SN school? Or if it gets really bad could he be based there and do outreach to the village school. It is such hard work when you are having to provide all the educational stuff on top of everything else (and 3 children!). The relief when ds1 went to special school was immense, I stoped having to worry about him between 8.30am and 3.30 pm. I lost count of the number of people who said to me "oh you look so much better, you looked ill all last year".

Unless there's someone very knowledgable on site I think it is hard for ms schools, because the world of autism is so different from the NT world, and most people don't even realise that. They're extra dangerous because they don't know they don't know iyswim. The children look fine, so they can't understand just how different their processing and understanding of the world is. I realised how ignorant the general public are when I found out the ms school had spent 6 weeks trying to force ds1 to sit in a room with a broken flashing fluorescent light. They thoguht he was being difficult by refusing to go in there. Clueless.

I know what you mean about people 'not knowing what they don't know' Jimjams - when we were doing the understanding ASD online course (all the mainstream staff at our school now are doing it) everybody was always making comments like 'now I can see why child x wouldn't do that'
It's the sensory thing that's been most revealing to me - you start to notice things like the hum from an overhead projector which you never did before.
We've had a sensory room for about two years now & it is so beneficial - they particularly love the aromatherapy and the big bubble tubes.

Yeas its frightening- I think for a lot of children (not all) the sensory stuff is the root cause of all their problems- ds1's inability to speak for example is I think something to do with sensory processing, although I'm not sure what (have lots of conflicting ideas). But the really frightening thing is that unless people have had some training they don't even know the sensory problems exist.

HI school now does a great deal of sensory work with the pupils- we can really see the benefit at home

When the head of the resource does her standard talk to outsiders, she shows them three graphs based on the sensory questionnaire we give to all the parents of new children - the sensory problems show up as different coloured bars for the different senses - the usual 5 + vestibular & propriocentric.
The first graph is hers - a 'normal' adult -she has a few issues with not liking being in a noisy room etc and she is diabetic which affects her sense of taste, so there are a few odd bars.
The second is 'an adult with inner ear damage'- actually me - I have a few more bars on the hearing & vestibular bits, and then the third is one of the children - absolutely full of coloured bars. It always gets a slightly shocked response from the audience and I think it does begin to give some understanding of the problems they face.

HI as an infant teacher I do a lot with my children through VAK - visual, auditory and kinestheticengagement (ALPS Approach, Smith & Call. This in short (very short because there is much more to it!!)ensures that all children in the class can access teaching and learning because we all have a preferred learning style. So by providing visual information for your child in the form of a pictorial list of instructions you 'may' be appealing to a visual learner and interestibgly enough boys tend noe to favour auditory information eg. mums/teachers nagging reminders

oops should have previewed that message before posting, loads of typing errors but mainly should read kinesthetic engagement and not all one word.

sorry TIRED!!!!

Oh that's a good way of demonstrating it rustybear.

I'm currently consulting with Donna Williams (have you come accross her-- you'll get to her website from google- she's autistic herself) trying to suss out exactly what is going on with ds1's perception - in an attempt to know how best to proceed with improving ds1's language (and for advice on coping with autism driven challenging behaviours). It's very interesting, she;s made me realise how he's not thinking in words at all (but prob in vision, smell, movement and associations). It's very hard to get your (well my!) head around, but makes it easier to tune into him. Lucy Blackman (who is very like ds1) has descriibed how she used to have to touch things before she could see them. DS1 has to toouch things as he moves about and I wonder whether that's related. She also describes how she would go under trees, loose all sesnse of where she was (because depth percepion was lost) and would find herself screaming. DS1 sometimes does the same with trees, refuses to walk under them- and I know he has depth problems....... so all very fascinating.

Some of the questions in the questionnaire are very interesting -can't remember the exact wording, but it's something like 'is s/he unable to hear something if they are tasting something' and similar questions for other pairs of senses. There's over 100 questions altogether, so it's very detailed.

In the early days of the resource we had a little girl who was scared of toilets - wouldn't go anywhere except one of the toilets at home - it wasn't until the new head of the resource came & started researching the sensory thing that they started to get through to her - by the time she left she would even go to the loo at McDonald's!
You can realise though what an incredible sensory overload you get in a toilet - not just the smells, but the echoey sounds, the light reflecting off the tiles & mirrors, the slippery feel....
We had a toilet game she used to play with her TA - you use the toilet at school - move forward 3 spaces - until she got to the golden toilet at the end!