On sudden, dramatic, changes!
And unschooling. And being patient. This one maybe is more for the parents...
The past week or two has just been so nuts and incredible in terms of all of these developments for A-. As I've said before, I'm really astonished that I'm astonished. I shouldn't be astonished when a 5 year old grows, all by himself, in leaps and bounds! But perhaps I've been conditioned to not expect it.
Three big things:
Suddenly there's all these words being articulated very clearly.
Suddenly his body is able to attend to things in a more *still* way.
Reading.
He's saying a TON with his mouth, and those sorts of leaps do happen every few months. But now he's got all these long phrases where a word or two are very clear, and sometimes even the whole phrase.
For some kids (I think younger than A-), this is just a natural part of moving through GLP stages. But for A- he's at a higher GLP stage, but still expressively communicates through gestalts (and words, and original phrases probably), but they're largely unintelligible. But suddenly he's saying "ah da da da" over and over and then one time saying "ah went da da da".
And we haven't done any PROMPT or articulation work. The most we've done has been Pictellos that are zoomed in on my mouth where I slooooowly say things like "Moooooove like a dinnnnnosaur". And he does LOVE watching those Pictellos.
Attention can look different for so many people. And we've never let his moving body stop us from teaching him. BUT there has now been twice - once in speech and once at a playground - where he's spent minutes observing someone carefully with a still body. Our speech therapist showed him Proloquo2Go (also - he allowed that! Which he hasn't for about a year or more!), after he swung for 20 minutes, and he sat there watching what she was doing. Then at a playground Daniel showed him how to climb up a rock climbing wall, and his body was still enough to watch Daniel and then climb up himself!*
I was thinking about how most kids need movement - especially jumping and spinning in circles - and how that diminishes over time. I remember spending recesses in elementary school just having spinning contests. But by junior high, we weren't spinning at recess anymore. And now at 42, daily exercise is all I need to help me get through my day. So if A-'s need for certain motion is x + 100, for example, but x just goes down naturally as we age, it makes sense that maybe before he needed to be moving, spinning, jumping ALL DAY, and now he could do it for 20 minutes of a 30 minute speech therapy session and then attend to what he wants.
He’s also started lining toys and water bottles up in a typical autistic play sort of way, but he’s NEVER done that before and I wonder if it’s related.
And, on the theme of "ya duh your kid will develop", this is something I've really wanted us to focus on in OT - how to get A- the regulation he needs so that he can do things that he finds pleasure in (like watching his SLP, or rock climbing), and I'm not saying he doesn't need that help, but also.... getting older.... natural changes.....
I've already written about reading and letters but the burst continues! And we think it's deeply related to the ability to still his body. Either:
He's always been reading these words and saying them in his head, but his body wasn't able to move towards the book, to stop and touch the book, and hear what we have to say, OR
While he was taking in our reading, the ability to look at combos of letters did need his body to be able to look at the book we read for long enough to pick up on that.
Since I have lots of new followers, I just want to point out that we unschool A-. We haven't "worked on" these skills in any traditional sense in the word. He only gets 30 minutes of Speech Therapy a week and we just started with a new OT at home.
This summer for a couple of months he went through a period that I'll now call "Wintering" where he didn't want to go outside at all, he just wanted to watch bus videos on youtube (with NO dialogue or text), and not interact with us, all day. Many smart people told us to allow it. We did (but still stressed about it!). That was then followed by a couple of months of the "Ready Set Go" period, which he still does, but was JUST choreographing us all the time.
We were talking last night about an article by Julia Bascom (which is in my pinned resource post) and how she wrote about pacing back and forth all evening and was processing the day and language. And I wonder if that's what was happening during the Wintering. Yes it was a break, and rest, and that rest allowed processing to happen.
*(I'm not saying that one must imitate to learn, as one ABA provider tried to tell me!!! A- already learns VERY effectively by experimentation, and constant exposure. But in this particular case he did observe Daniel to do the thing).
