Oh yeah, and school work for The Girl

Lest you think I forget, I am planning on educating my daughter this year. Again.

The Girl is autistic -- she thinks in pictures, moves on impulse, speaks little. She can spell and diagram sentences, but she can't easily make sentences from her thoughts. She's old enough to be starting 5th grade, but she's actually just about starting third grade.

She can multiply single digits, round numbers, borrow/carry to add/subtract. She knows her shapes, can (mostly) calculate perimeter and area, and has a basic grasp on word problems. Unless you ask, "How much more?" Then you've lost her, partly because she doesn't have a solid grasp on more/less to begin with. Lord knows I've tried. She can count money pretty well, and she can almost tell time. It's a struggle.

She knows all the parts of speech, and can label them in sentences, including predicate nominatives. ;) Her usage is pretty good, except that she doesn't write with past tense verbs. You heard me. If she stumbles and falls, it doesn't matter so much when. The important thing is that she just did. "Yesterday, I trip at the pool." Yeah. Don't even think about irregular verbs. Or relative adjectives: faster of the two, fastest of them all.

Aaaand that brings up to reading. She can decode brilliantly, but has very poor comprehension. She can read, "The cat runs up the tree." Ask her what the cat did, and she has no idea. She can look at the sentence and not know. If we discuss the materials before I ask questions, she can sometimes answer the questions. "'The cat runs up the tree." That cat is really fast like Ricky! Whoosh! Where is he running?" All I can do is keep working at it, mostly with first and second grade reading comprehension workbooks. Eventually, it'll click?

I've been looking at Nanci Bell's "dual coding" concept. She maintains that in order to get information from speech or written language, you need two things: the words themselves and a mental image for the words. If you've ever been tired enough to read a paragraph over and over without getting anything out of it, you have an idea of what it means. Until you can translate the words on the page into mental images, you will never have any comprehension of what you read. Conversely, until you can make words from that picture in your head, you cannot communicate your thoughts.

She calls her method Visualizing and Verbalizing, and it requires a therapist to work through various stages and steps toward making solid visual images to go with the words. Unfortunately, in order to build new neural pathways in the child's brain, she requires the child to work two to four hours a day, five days a week. The nearest person trained in this is an hour's drive away, and they would work with The Girl two hours a day, two days a week. The hitch is that it's going to cost the earth, and only a quarter of it can be billed to my health insurance, if that. There is a training session nearby in August that I could take, but I'm not sure I can do it.

And her behavior. Oy vey. Impulsive, loud, stubborn, compulsive. Fortunately, one of her compulsions is to do schoolwork, preferably workbooks. Think of little old women doing crossword puzzles, and you have a pretty good idea of The Girl doing schoolwork.

So maybe I should be thinking less of multiplication and more of behavior modification? The same school that would provide the language therapy can also do a lot of testing, as can LearningRx, where I still have a free evaluation card. I just can't bring myself to fill in one more freaking "What are your concerns for your child?" form.

What now? I think now we get her evaluated for apropriateness for using Visualizing and Verbalizing, as well as potentially getting the school on board for behavior. I suspect that they're going to tell me what everyone else has said. "You know your child best. You know best what she needs. Do what she needs." Oy vey.