New World Order
March 2, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
I just met with my son Charlie’s teacher (he is in a self-contained classroom with a 1:1 teacher:student ratio located in a local public school). For the past five years? six years? we have been working on teaching Charlie to write. When he was five years old, he was able to trace and to write his name, in a large and scrawling form. His fingers are long and slender and grasping the pencil has been a skill to learn in and of itself; letters with curves and diagonal lines have not been easy for him to form, and we have tried many handwriting programs.
Charlie’s teacher talked to me about starting him on a typing program; I sensed that they will put the writing program aside for the time being. Of course I would like Charlie to learn to write all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers, but, even more, I hope for him to learn to express himself. He has taken a real liking to playing the piano—with both hands—and I think that typing might come a little more easily to him: Years of playing the piano—since I was six—made typing easy for me to learn when I was in high school. I also inspired by the typing of teenager DJ Savarese as narrated in his father Ralph Savarese’s forthcoming book, Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption.
(As one of my college students turned in a midterm exam to me today, he made a point of showing me his handwriting—which seems to consist of a number of lines like this ))))))); I assured him I could read it.)
Charlie walked before he crawled; he has reached many of his “developmental milestones” out of order or rather, I should say, in an order all his own. And the lesson for me as Charlie’s mother is to understand the new world order he shows me, if I can only look carefully enough.
Yup – no crawling around here, skip that bit. I think one of mine is allergic to pencils – scratch that, any tool that you are supposed to hold in your hand…..but then suddenly, the last few weeks…..too early to tell, but there are some things that you just have to look at differently. I definitely think that the keyboard communication in view of his piano skills would be a much more productive and positive move.
Have a great weekend.
Cheers
Typing, playing piano, for me it was playing clarinet and flute – it’s all just another set of keys.
I’m sure he will be good at it.
Have you had him tested for dysgraphia? Sometimes the programs that OTs pick for handwriting don’t work as well for kids who are dysgraphic.
If you want a fun program, if you can find Mario Teaches Typing, it’s really cute. I like it a lot better than some of the programs the school gave us.
I think typing is an excellent idea. I have a student who is just about Charlie’s age (nearly 10) who can, given a box for each letter, sort of write her name (it’s legible only if you know what you’re looking at).
About a month ago, I brought in a label maker to school and gave it to her to see what she would do. Within a week, she was copying the month from on top of our calendar (far point copying) and she is now requesting “maker” when she needs to write.
This is not to say that we’re giving up on writing altogether; she is still required to write her name on all her papers, for instance. It’s just that I don’t want her difficulties in handwriting to prevent her from progressing in other areas. (She can’t write her numbers, but can add with number stamps to “write” the answer.)
Good luck to Charlie with the typing.
There’s also a typing programme featuring Timon & Pumbaa that Brendan liked a lot.
Once he was allowed to do his schoolwork by typing Brendan’s handwriting started to improve (go fig). Because of the OCD he’s ceased typing (sigh) so we’re getting ready to switch to voice-recognition software instead. I suspect that piano-playing Charlie will have a lot of fun typing!
The school is going to use Type to Learn from Sunburst so we’ll try it at home too and keep the others in mind! Thanks Jennifer—yes, it’s not that we’re giving up on writing entirely but I welcome the thought of giving him another tool to use for his communication.