Life with Aspergers

We all want to send our kids to school and have them return as bright and educated young adults. Unfortunately the "playing field" is far from level and many of our kids simply struggle too much with everyday tasks to become academic superstars. Sometimes we just have to revise our goals and accept that we, our children and the school have done the best that we can do. Too often I find that parents are confused by school. They believe that the purpose of school is nothing more than to return our kids to society with an academic education.  They consider that what their kids  are learning at school isn't useful if it isn't focussed on the their child's primary issues. The reality it somewhat different.  In this post, I want to touch on some of the supports in and around school systems and see how they combine to help children with special needs. Hopefully by the end of this post, you'll understand that school is only a small part of your child's educa...

Just drawing your attention to an interview I posted on Speech Buddies; An Interview with Gavin Bollard http://www.speechbuddy.com/blog/interview/an-interview-with-gavin-bollard/ Speech Buddies is the web site of Articulate Technologies. They are focused on Speech Therapy and help children, parents, schools, speech therapists, health care providers, and pediatricians. They even have free custom lesson plans available.

This post is part of Best of the Best, Edition 9: Special Needs Therapy . If you check the above link from August 14 onwards, you'll find a whole host of similar articles by other authors. Introduction I'm presuming that most people will be writing from the point of view of parenting their own children. I could do that. My children have been through speech and occupational therapy (both of which were excellent), listening therapy (which quite frankly I found unhelpful) and a couple of other formal therapies. They've also had plenty of chances for informal therapy - did you know that simply owning a dog can be theraputic too? As usual though, I'm going to try to be different. I want to talk about what it's like going through therapy and how it helps. Speech Therapy When I was a child, I went through a couple of different types of therapy with the two biggies being speech and occupational therapy. I wasn't diagnosed with aspergers then but simply had a ...

Active Imagination Activity Book 50 Sensorimotor Activities to improve focus, attention, strength and co-ordination Kelly Tilley. MCISc. OTR/L Published by Sensory World There are all kinds of different therapies for children on the autism spectrum but in my opinion, two stand out head and shoulders above the rest; Speech Therapy and Occupational Therapy. Both of these are expensive and even with government support, it's unusual for parents to be able to continue beyond one or two terms at a time. You won't become an occupational therapist simply by using this book but you will learn a lot of fun and simple techniques to achieve many of the same things that occupational therapists work toward. This book is intended for use with children and adults who need help with attention, calming down and energizing but I can see that it will also provide a lot of benefit for people with poor co-ordination and/or low muscle tone - two things which affect many people on the autism sp...

Acting is a gift which seems to come naturally to many people with autism and Asperger's syndrome yet only a select few follow it as a career.  Dan Ackroyd and Daryl Hannah are some of the most obvious and vocal examples but there are plenty of others.  Dan Ackroyd, on the extreme right has Asperger's Syndrome We are always acting I have a theory that people on the spectrum tend to be good at acting because they spend so much of their daily lives acting - and from a very early age. For example, it's true that autistic people often don't get jokes (although you rarely hear us complaining when neurotypicals don't get ours).  Young people quickly learn that it's easier to "act like you got the joke" than it is to take the brunt and embarrassment of being the only one who didn't. We are quite often called upon to "act amused". Then there are those sad and solemn occasions where sometimes we feel intense waves of emotion - and sometimes we don...