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. [...]
Behavior management and the summer months. When it comes to an autistic child one of the aspects that strikes the greatest fear in parents is the whole conundrum of behavior management. And what is behavior management? In its broadest sense managing behavior is a lot about getting your autistic child to engage in society [...]
Autism spectrum disorders: Developing communication and instructional strategies We often get questions from families about how to manage their child's Autistic spectrum disorder, in particular the use of Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA). While Val and I researched an attempted to use ABA with our boys, it was not a success. We had to find [...]
Finding Dory speaks to disabilities in a powerful way I just saw Finding Dory, another wonderful production from the guys over at Pixar. And as with many connected with Hollywood and the film industry they are challenging society to think about what we all represent. In this case the challenge comes in the form of special needs [...]
What autism services do I need? Today I'm going to speak about diagnosis and autism services in a clinical way. I will leave the enormous emotional aspect aside for another time. However I will say this, as I write here my son Conor is working across from me. He was diagnosed as autistic, intellectually disabled and profoundly [...]
A great many parents worry about Disney animation overstimulating their autistic child. Without question an unsupervised autistic child can become over stimulated watching Disney animation. I remember Conor as a young child glued to his favorite Disney animation and becoming totally over stimulated. It was clear to me that Conor enjoyed the experience of watching Disney animation. But I [...]
Autism and Disney animation Up to now Val and I have concentrated on general topics relating to language development. In this post we are now turning to our language research with Disney animation. We started generally because it takes a village to raise a child and understanding this is really important when it comes to autism [...]
Autism: how we taught speech and language. While it might sound obvious, if your child has autism or a speech and language disorder, your ability to practice language with your child becomes very restricted. I think the key word here is practice. I remember Conor turning 10 years old and thought my god, if he and I [...]
