Picture Exchange Communication (PECS) I had the opportunity to speak with another wonderful mom recently from Sidney about her 7 year old son Matt. Matt's primary communication system is PECS, or picture exchange communication. Receptively Matt was able to hear and understand single concept sentences, like bed time or jump on the trampoline. Sentences [...]
Autism and selecting a school for your child One of the most important decisions we make as parents is selecting a school for our children. For most of us, this is a fairly straightforward affair frequently following a time honoured tradition of attending your local community school. But if your child has diagnosis be [...]
Autism, communication and parenting: our journey to learning readiness. One of the most frequent questions I get asked by parents is 'how do I get my son to co-operate with me?'. If I were to translate this question into a term more familiar to teachers, it would be how to get 'instructional control' [...]
Online autism speech and language programs How we achieved the level of speech and language our boys now have is of interest to many parents. Val and I receive hundreds of messages everyday seeking information and advice based on our experiences with Conor and Eoin. Many of these e-mails relate to online speech and [...]
Autism and getting the best out of school I can’t believe the summer is all but gone and the children are returning to school. Even here at the national university of Ireland in Galway, the campus is coming alive with no less than 20,000 students. Having spent more than 20 years in industry surrounded [...]
Special needs parenting, you can't do it on your own. There are times that I feel a little confused by advocacy and the debate surrounding the needs of our autistic children. In all the advocacy within society about parenting special-needs children, I believe the fundamentals can get forgotten. By this I mean that [...]
Autism and getting out and about with your child. With the summer arriving, and the children soon finishing school many parents are speaking to me about getting out and enjoying the summer with their children. This can be somewhat more complicated when one or a number of your family are autistic. In many [...]
Sports activities and the autistic child. For anyone who is a frequent reader of my posts on the development of autistic children, they will know the importance I place on sports activities and the use of the great outdoors in the development of our children. And right from the get go, just as with [...]
Learning readiness: sensory integration and processing If your child is everywhere at once and has the concentration span of a goldfish, how can you teach him anything? Our special needs children frequently have difficulty processing sensory information. What this means is that they have difficulties learning from their senses. They are not learning ready. [...]
Disaster strikes! The calm before the storm As we discussed in previous blogs, the path to getting Lea Oh into the water went, well, flawlessly. In fact, for a boat that was in storage for over 10 years, the boat's inventory of everything from scrubbing brushes to near new sails was quite astonishing! Even [...]
