Perfect Imperfection

As many of you know I love to talk about my kids at school.  This year my greatest challenge has been working with a classroom of kids who are, for the most part, completely non-verbal.  My question has been, “How do you teach social skills and other abstract concepts to kids that are so low that most of them barely speak?”  While I truly love these little darlings, teaching them has been a great challenge and I’ve had to revamp a lot of my curriculum and look for new ideas.

One of our main goals this year was to have the kids recognize their own names, be able to say them, and then recognize other kids’ names.  About halfway through the year I discovered we had an over achiever because he was not only recognizing the other kids names but he started to use them.  I was so excited!  I didn’t expect to see all that progress.  But now we come to the dilemma and reason for this post.  This little guy has mastered a lot of speech sounds but there are a few he still struggles with, namely ‘x’.  One of the kids in the class is named Phoenix and every time this little guy tries to say ‘Phoenix’ it comes out, well, really badly.  His ‘x’ comes out like an ‘s’ and the ‘ho’ sounds more like an ‘e’….are you getting the picture here (if not, go ask your mom).  Yes, fun huh!  And even worse…he gets really excited about saying the kids names so he’s usually screaming the names by the time he gets to Phoenix.  Another fun fact about Autism…these kids usually like to repeat things over and over again (and he does).  The adults in the room usually cover it up by saying the name with him and really emphasizing the ‘x’.

So that’s what I was dealing with today.  Humorous, but also a little concerning.  I don’t want to discourage the little guy because he’s doing so well but I also worry about what other kids in the hall think I’m teaching the kids in this school.  Here’s hoping he gets the ‘x’ sound REAL soon!

After working with the kid who has a potty mouth I went into the High Functioning Autism classroom.  These kids can all speak and sometimes that’s part of the problem.  I was having all the kids sanitize their hands before our activity when a very nervous student asked me if I had purchased the hand sanitizer at Wal-Mart.  He then informed me that all the bread and hand sanitizer that was made at Wal-Mart is poisonous because they put special chemicals in these products.  I then assured him I hadn’t purchased the hand sanitizer from Wal-Mart to which he responded it would be better if I made my own for next time.  Where do they come up with this stuff?