Teen Autism

Because of Nigel’s aversion to holding a writing instrument, and his earlier difficulty with acquiring verbal skills, I had always thought that learning to type would liberate him to no end. He had taught himself to read at three and a half, so I didn’t think it was too much of a stretch.

I had purchased a kids’ learn-to-type CD-Rom program years ago, when he was about seven, but he had been resistent to working with it until we started homeschooling three months ago. Maybe it seemed academic to him and he didn’t want to do “work” outside of school. When school became something he did at home, he was only too happy to work with the typing CD-Rom during the designated time for electives. And he loves it.

That probably has something to do with the fact that the CD-Rom is by Disney – Adventures in Typing with Timon and Pumbaa. The Lion King was the first Disney movie he saw that motivated him to try to quote single words, his first attempts at echolalia. And I had seen it on the big screen when I was pregnant with him, so it’s always been a special movie for me as well. But now I love it because it has motivated Nigel to learn to type, and he’s enjoying it. He typed the horse video summary by himself, as well as several others. He says he’s going to type up a list of all his invention ideas.

So, typing, paragraphs . . . maybe next a mini-essay? A blog post? Not quite yet, but someday, quite possibly soon.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Homeschooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.