Oh my goodness. Monkey has suddenly become obsessed with letters! He marches around the house spouting off various letters. He identifies letters he sees around the house. One of his favorite activities is telling us who each letter represents, example…A = “Audrey, Annie!”, R=”Ryan!”, etc. It’s crazy cool.
Last night, Duhdee and Monkey sat on the floor of his room for nearly a half hour spelling out the names of his classmates on his Magna Doodle. What is really super cool is that Monkey can orally spell the names of quite a few of them all by himself he just needs someone else to write the letters. He’s still having a lot of trouble with the strength in his fingers so holding a pencil and making letters is really hard.
I’m thinking we need to add another accommodation to his IEP, I think he needs to learn keyboarding. I don’t want to give up on writing but I think he would make super strides with letter recognition/identification, reading and communication in general if we formally introduced the idea of using a keyboard. Has anyone else added this accommodation to your child’s IEP? How do you phrase it and when did you add it?
Yeah for Monkey! We didn’t have that in any of our IEP’s….but it may become an issue with Evan…he’s still obsessed with letters! This reminds me of one of Kyle’s expressions when he was younger and had to write. He would hold the pencil with the lead right above the paper, and plead with the pencil, “Come onnnnnnnn, pencil,” like that would somehow make the pencil work!
Ha! I try that with my brain sometimes….”Come onnnnn, brain!” never seems to work, lol.
hey did you hear about the changes to the DSM? npr has been going on and on about autism/asberger’s and I wonder if that or other changes will affect Monkey? of course none of the changes will be official until 2013, but….
Yay for Monkey! Also, I think keyboarding is a great idea!
Lisa, I have heard about it. I don’t think it will make a difference to Monkey. He has a PDD-NOS diagnosis now which, in practice at least, is treated as an ASD already. The Fragile X diagnosis is enough to qualify us for services and we pretty much rely on that for everything.
I will try my hardest to remember to post some of the tactics we are using for writing/hand strengthening. Remind me if I don’t do it within the week.
Thanks! Monkey has made great strides in hand strength but it’s still not good…any suggestions are always appreciated!