Friday, December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas


(Christmas Eve art project)
 
New apron for chef Mowgli.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Madagascar

Mowgli knows what he likes.
He likes Dreamworks movies.
(and Pixar, but we'll get to them later)



This is the sort of picture Mowgli takes when he gets hold of the camera.  We have lots of documentation of all his favorite movies. 


This is Melmen (Melman) escaping from his box on the beach.  



And I'm sure you remember the scene in the second movie, when they get in the plane, and seeing as the plane is piloted by penguins, it crashes gloriously.  We've crashed lots of toy planes in our house lately.


Coming Next:  Kung Fu Panda

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Triumphant Return

Apologies for my lengthy absence, there were issues and doctors and plungers and robots, but hopefully things are better now.  But really who cares, when I have new cool stuff to share. 

Like this.  I was shopping in a little asian grocery store when I saw possibly the most awesome/horrific product ever:



And this: 

That is Mowgli's favorite toy stuck to his tummy there.  We were at the hardware store when Mowgli asked for a pair of plungers.  Plungers are cheap so I said yes, and agreed that he could have two.  But as we were walking around finishing up I found myself saying things like, "Keep your plungers to yourself."  and "If you can't behave we'll put the plungers back."

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Lunch

Mowgli just packed his own lunch.  It's Saturday night, and he's already had dinner, so I'm not sure where he's planning on eating it.  But this is going to be one amazing meal:
  • marshmallows
  • tortilla chips
  • 5 and 1/2 apples
  • peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Halloween is scary.

As we were walking home from trick-or-treating, a nine year old walking near us said "I wanna be really scared.  Like, I wanna have nightmares tonight."

Thing is, halloween doesn't need any help to be scary. 

You put on strange itchy clothes.
Then you knock on doors of houses that you usually never go up to.
Angry sounding dogs bark at you.
And in our neighborhood, adult men wearing masks hide in the bushes and jump out at you.
Then the smoke machine and strobe lights turn on so that this thick smoke curls between you and your parents trapping you with these strange people who jump out of bushes. 

One guy who really scared Mowgli felt so bad.  He started trying to apologize, but the first thing out of his mouth was, "Look, it's ok.  I have snacks.  They're good snacks.  Fat free."

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Tofu

A few days ago, I made some miso soup.  This was the first time that I have served tofu on the dinner table and Mowgli didn't gag when he tried it.  I keep serving tofu, because it's one of the few things I can be absolutely certain that Mowgli doesn't like.  Or at least that was my plan.

See, Mowgli's a smart kid.  He knows the 'right' answer.  He knows what adults want to hear.  So when we ask him if he liked X.  The reply he always gives is "I like X."  always with the same sing-song intonation. 

Was that a good apple?
It's a good apple.
Was that a good brownie?
It's a good brownie.
Was that a good mushroom?
It's a good mushroom.
Did you like those noodles?
I like noodles.
Did you like the tofu?
I like tofu.

Many parents would give anything to quit hearing but I don't like it.  Sometimes my brother is one of them.   But this is a real problem for us!  Mowgli's not answering the question, he's just giving us the response that he thinks will satisfy us.  And really, he's at an age where it's developmentally appropriate to think about favorites.  Favorite colors, favorite movies, favorite stories, favorite shirts...  We've got to get past just replying it's good to everything. 

But tofu made him gag.  Mowgli would tell me it's good around choking on it.  It was a golden opportunity.  So my glorious plan was to periodically serve tofu until he would tell me It's yucky! I don't like it!

Well, that was my plan until tonight.  Tonight I used the tofu leftover from the miso soup to make mabo dafu, a lovely combination of tofu & ground beef with a thick sauce.  Tonight he ate the rice and the tofu.  He picked the ground beef off of the tofu.  Ate the tofu.  Then asked for seconds of tofu.  He did not want seconds of rice.  He wanted tofu.  And he ate the seconds too. 

I can't tell if I'm winning or losing this battle. 

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Being angry

I just saw an article in the NY Times about how this generation of American parents almost universally yells at their kids.   And of course, like spanking, we shouldn't do it because it might harm the little tykes psychologically.

I think that's ridiculous even with neurotypical kids, but with autistic kids it's just downright wrong.

See a lot of the early research showed that autistic individuals don't recognize emotions, but that's not exactly true.  It's relatively easy to learn the 'big' emotions:  happy, mad, sad.  This person is very happy, and they can see that.


But almost universally, they never learn to recognize more subtle emotions, like say this

 So what does this have to do with yelling?  Well, if your child can't tell you're upset if you're only a little bit upset, then you have to act upset enough so that they recognize it.  They have to understand that what they just did was bad, or dangerous, or mean, and that their actions have an impact on the people around them.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Rediscovering Cracker Jack

Eating is a lot more interesting when you have to pay attention to the ingredients of every single thing you eat.  I can't buy bags of meatballs at the grocery store because they have breadcrumbs in them.  I can't let my son eat a hamburger at school, because those burgers usually have textured vegetable protein in them, and that may or may not contain wheat.  And you might as well skip the snack food aisle.  Most BBQ potato chips have milk, and don't even think about the Sour Cream & Onion.  Even the chili cheese fritos have wheat.

So it was with great joy that I read the ingredients of a Cracker Jack box today.  In slight translation, the ingredients are:
sugar
corn
more corn
peanuts
more sugar
and more corn


Sunday, October 4, 2009

Two more play-script books

Ok the first two books I made were for playing Pirates & Dragons.  Nice thing about those, I didn't have to draw any people.  People are harder than just about anything else to draw.  This time I manned up and drew some people, in two very different styles.

Let's Play Doctor:




Let's Play Fireman:



The way we use these for therapy is to have Mowgli play with the toy for a little while.  Then he reads the book with his therapist, then they act out the play-script with the toys again. 

Again, anyone who wants to use these images for their own therapeutic purposes, is welcome to do so. 

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

What does = mean?

There's a lot of work out there on how american kids don't know what = means.  Nicole McNeil, Martha Alibali, and Bethany Rittle-Johnson have done some really remarkable work on this phenomenon recently.

It boils down to all of the arithmetic problems that kids see in an american math class have the form:
  • 3 + 4 = ____
  • 4 + 29 = ____
  • 54*31 = ____
  • 81/ 9 = ____
  • 1/4 * 2/3 = ____
Are you starting to see a pattern?  There's a computation to be performed then an equals sign, then a blank to be filled in.  If this is the only type of math problem that you see then clearly = means 'do the calculation'

From this point of view, the statement 4+5 = 3+6 makes no sense.  There's no computation to be performed.  So it's just confusing.  If you believe that equals means 'write the answer' and there's no answer to write, then that's going to create some cognitive dissonance.  And when students see a problem like 4+5 = 2+ ___, they can't even understand the problem. 

The thing is, this misconception about what = means doesn't go away by high school, or college.  There are even some studies that show that practice like the items in the bulleted list actually make students even worse at mathematics, because they reinforce that misconception about equality.  Students don't understand that equals means 'the two sides are the same' because all of their experience says that equals means 'put the answer'

This is a well studied problem, but it's closely related to something I observed yesterday in a student that came to my office hours.  The class is a 200-level stats class for science and engineering majors.  This guy came in for help studying for today's exam.  He kept asking, so What do I do with a Binomial distribution? what do I do with a Poisson distribution?    I'm not sure I can explain the level to which these questions don't make sense.  It's kinda like asking, What do I do with an elephant?  You could feed the elephant, you could ride the elephant, you could train the elephant to do tricks, you could weight the elephant.  There's no computation that you do on an elephant, it just is.  You can use the elephant to accomplish different tasks, but there's no one thing that an elephant is for.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The circus has come to town

So, the Prez and some 19 of his buddies are having a party across the street from my office tomorrow night.  I've been walking past armies of suits on my way to school every morning. But don't worry, the lapel pins are always in place to let you know what country the suit came from.  Apparently my office building is closed because it's in sniper range or something.


This is the brand new 8 ft pop-up fence that's been installed since yesterday.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

distributed leadership

There's a view of leadership that it's heroic.  A great leader takes the reins and drives the herd somewhere new and exciting against all odds, fighting forces from within and without, and the exceptional things that are achieved rest solely upon the leader.

Now this might work for a general, but a principal who has this view is supremely annoying.  I really like the work of Jim Spillane out of Northwestern University on distributed leadership.  In this view, leadership is setting up the organization so that everyone in it is working toward the same goal effectively.  The actions of the leader tell less than half the story, the key is really the interactions.

Which is why I am so annoyed at Mowgli's school principal again.  They have space to set up a sensory room in the K-2 autism support classroom.  They have the space!!!  This is the number one thing that most schools don't have.  They need a little bit of money to get the space set up right.  I volunteered to help raise the money.  Apparently, they're so un-used to volunteers that this has made their heads explode.  They don't know if we can donate money or if we have to donate the objects.  They don't know if I could bring a team of volunteers in to help paint the room, they have to check with the maintenance union.  The fact that I want to make a donation to the school, and they're reaction is 'wow, I don't know if that's allowed' rather than 'wow, let's do this thing' blows my mind.  

Of course this is on top of the fact that I suspect Mowgli's fork got confiscated at the metal detector yesterday.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Teaching Play

One of the things we've been working really hard on around here is pretend play.  This is a really hard thing to teach because most children don't have to be taught, they just do it naturally.  One way to try to teach it is to give the child some templates of play, or play scripts.  Since Mowgli can already read, I decided to use books to provide the templates.

I went to the bookstore to try and find a few appropriate books, but the selection, um.... left something to be desired.  All of the books at his reading level had plots that were way way way to complicated.  All of the books for younger kids had no plot at all.  So I decided to make my own.

They were really fun to make.  They've both got a total of 4 pages including the cover.  They're bound with embroidery thread.  The illustrations were done with india ink & watercolor.  I constructed 2 more books that I haven't written anything in yet.  I'll post them as soon as I've finished the illustrations. 




Let's Play Dragon

 
Let's Play Pirates. 


Mowgli loved them & they've been great so far.

Images are free to copy for use in therapy. 

Sunday, September 6, 2009

An altered state of normal

I thought about just jumping in.  Maybe showing off my latest creation.  Writing a post like what I hope will become average fare around here.  But then I figured an introduction is more in order.

See I don't really know what normal looks like any more.  Every family has stories about the time cousin dave jumped into the swimming pool when he was 2 and Aunt Sarah had to go in after him.  My family has stories about the time Mowgli almost walked off the bow of the USS Stewart at Sea Wolf Park.  

Notice the destroyer is parked on concrete, not docked in water.

But see those events don't really sum up the true distance from normal.  For most people, those are outlier events.  Things that happen once or twice in a childhood, they're not things that you have to plan against constantly.  We have alarms on all of our windows because more than once, Mowgli has gone out of a 3rd story window.  And I don't mean he's leaned out.  I mean all the way out, standing on a ledge about 5 inches wide.  Why not lock them?  Well the boy's just too smart, he's figured out every lock we've put on every door or window.  So we settle for alarms.

So what does normal look like around this house?  Normal is asking, "What do you want for dinner?" and getting "coming soon to DVD" in reply.  Normal is driving Mowgli to some sort of therapy 3 days a week, and having a therapist visit our house on 3 of the remaining 4 days.  Normal was crossing the street to avoid someone walking their dog so that Mowgli didn't become terrified of the pup and go into fight-or-flight mode.  Normal is trying to teach a little boy who just started first grade and is reading at a second grade level how to play with a toy pirate ship.

Think about that.  You don't have to teach kids how to play with toys.  You put the toy in front of the kid and imagination takes over.  But that's life in our house.  We have to teach Mowgli how to play.  We have to teach him how to say 'catch' before he throws a ball and pegs another kid.  We've worked very hard to teach him to say "I don't like that."  The boy will eat tofu, and while shuddering from how badly it tastes, say, "I like tofu." 

This dragon is called autism.  We just do our best to keep dancing. 
 
Mowgli