Memory Tale: Peanut Butter Kisses

Christmas is my favorite holiday. I decorate for days, and bake for days. When the boys were quite young - perhaps 2-1/2 - I still put cookies out on the table. (Now the cookies get "put up" because it just doesn't work to tell Mikey to stop.) The usual holiday madness was going on.

As I passed by the cookie table, there they were - 8 peanut butter "kiss" cookies - minus the kisses! I guess someone liked the chocolate best of all.

Tidbits

Negative consequence

For a moment, I couldn't tell if the shriek was a person or a cat. We all stopped talking, and my daughter-in-law went toward the bedroom where the boys were supposed to be sleeping. "What's wrong?" she asked.
An agitated David - the originator of the scream - responded, "Mikey turned the night light off!"

[Mikey likes dark; David doesn't. But they want to sleep in the same room.]

"If you turn off the light, you won't be able to read your books," Mom said. End of this story. Except for this tag: I am most pleased the boys consider being denied books is a negative.

Algebra, Aleks and Pie Pieces

David's automated math program, Aleks, presents sets of concepts as wedges in a pie. Each pie section has a number of lessons, not always the same number. Completing a lesson is usually referred to as "completing a pie piece." After a couple of weeks, there is an assessment test. It is generated by time. One of the options for an answer is always, "I haven't learned this yet." If you click that button, and you have completed the work, a pop-up says, "Are you sure?"

David just lost 50 pie pieces during his last assessment test. He does not like having to do problems. I talked to him about this, and said, "David, I know what happened. You didn't want to take the time to do the assessment test, and you clicked the "I haven't learned this yet" button a lot. Right?"
"Right."
"Well, David, all that means is you have to do the work again."
"But I didn't remember."
"No, you didn't take the time to think." I know this is true because when we start doing the work again, he correctly solved problems that he had solved before. One of them he did not remember, and one of them is some of the beginning algebra. More on that in a moment.
"If you keep doing that, you'll be in 7th grade math forever. AND have to keep doing the same problems over and over again. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep a list of the concepts we learn this week, and next week, before we start doing anything online, we'll review these concepts on paper." He agreed to this much more readily than I thought he would.

Last week, we started working on slope-intercept. Except that all that he's asked to do for now is to graph linear equations (y=mx+b). David is very good at pattern matching and I could tell that he was not really "getting" the notion of solving for sets of answers.

Grandpa got us some graph paper. This week, before going online, I had already told him we were going to do some review.

So, first I had him solve y=x. Yea, I know it's silly; but last week, when this concept was first introduced, he had trouble understanding what to do with something like "y=2x+3" and was trying to find (2,3) as a point on this line.

So he found 3 points and drew the line. I followed this with "y=x+2" and had him put that line on the same graph. Also, "y=x-2." Negative numbers are not concrete - hard for any kid but especially for someone with autism.

"So David, what can you tell me about those lines?"

He looked at them for a second and said, "They are parallel."

I started to talk about it a little and he interrupted, "I GET it." We did do another set of similar equations, just to make sure. And we'll see how it looks next week.

GAN picnic

There is a local group called, "Grandparent Autism Network," (http://www.ganinfo.org/) that I joined sometime this past year. One of the ladies organizes an annual picnic at a part in South county that has a pool. I tried to volunteer to help, but they meet in the daytime, and I have a full-time job. So I brought cases of water and purchased one of the craft items that was used.

Neither of the boys knows how to swim. Both of them are sort of learning. Mikey has a life jacket that he wears, and he's willing to put his head under water - although we have to tell him not to breathe under water. So we were a little unsure about how long we could last at this. I don't swim either, although Marc does.

For the picnic, I made some chicken, deviled and hard boiled eggs, corn bread, brownies and brought some grapes.

The lady who organizes this gets lots of help from her church, and there were several adults dressed as clowns who were doing things like directions, handing out snacks, running the face-painting and [temporary] tatoo tent and the craft tents, signing folks in and tracking attendance at the pool. They did an extraordinary job.

David is "afraid" of many things. We are all working to try and expose him to some of these things in safe environments and trying to talk him through. And one of them is clowns. He didn't want to walk by them, park near them, etc.

And Grandpa said, "I don't think they are real clowns, just some people in face paint and funny hats." Bingo - that worked. David decided that scary clowns only came out on Halloween (we didn't argue the point).

Mikey wanted the pool. Period. He was willing to sit and eat, once we told him he had to do that before going to the pool. He was mostly pretty good; he got a little huffy when I told him to finish his chicken, but he didn't fuss too much. And he was antzy but didn't run off when we took the time to clean up our mess.

I did get to meet - briefly - the lady who organized the picnic, but not to really talk to her. Guess that will wait for another day.

Oh, and P.S. - the pool was fine. We had a good time. It was large, there were plenty of life guards, and the pool was roped. Mikey made comments about jumping off the board into the 12' water, but we told him he had to stay on this side of the rope; and that if he went past the rope, we would immediately go home. He understood and we were all fine.

I like to sleep at Grandma's house

From time to time, we have the boys overnight. (It generally means grandpa and I go to bed a little early, and the boys a little late.) And of course, Grandma - who is always up first - fixes breakfast.

So one bright Sunday morning, Grandpa asked David, "Do you like to sleep at Grandma's?"
"Yes!" came the reply.
"Why?" Grandpa asked.
"Because it smells good!"
"What," asked Grandpa, "does it smell like?"
"WAFFLES!"

OK, I admit it - I make homemade waffles when the boys stay over ;-).