How I taught my son to communicate? - Working on Typing Skills -2

 Out of sight (Parent Viewpoint)

Found our way n number of times,

no matter what, so far, we have

How, then, could we be lost this time?

I ask myself, as it doesn't make sense

it can't be a dead end -no! Perhaps,

there's  a path through it, in disguise

Shouldn't I retrace our steps once? Or

get a better view like from a bird's eye

Indeed sometimes one wise step back,

does but two steps forwards imply.

By, Anagha Jawalekar

Hello readers, I hope you had a great time reading the guest post by Ms. Archita Basu. 

So, resuming our journey again and sharing  how I worked on Akshat’s typing skills.

As I mentioned in the last post, we started facing limitations in the LetMeTalk app, as there was no way to form sentences in that. Therefore, I decided to work on Akshat’s typing once again in May 2018 (I had tried it earlier also around 2013 but left it because he did not pick up at all and I did not know how to work).

As he could read and identify words on cards easily, I thought he would type them also and hence I made some word cards and gave him to type. However, I was wrong, as he was not at all able to type them. (Typing requires altogether different skills than reading). The problem he was facing was that supposes he had to type ‘fan’, he would press ‘t’,’d’,’g’,’s’, or ‘h’ instead of ‘f’ and, I was clueless why this was happening and did not able to identify the reason. This went on for quite some time and, there was no change. This was so frustrating for me that it became difficult to bear it. He used to take 15-20 minutes sometimes to type a 2-3 words sentence and it was so difficult to keep the patience and I used to lose my temper and hit him. But at the same time, I used to feel guilty about the whole thing that I could not sleep well. At one time, I thought to give up the idea of teaching him typing thinking that it may be beyond his capacity.

Soon I realized that I was at fault somewhere because there was something, that I could not identify and, we both were suffering due to it. Therefore, I gathered myself and decided to go back to basics and start again. For that, I made alphabet cards and did the letter identification with him. I also made CVC word and picture cards and did identification, matching, and other activities. After practicing three-letter words, I moved to phonics, sight words, nouns, action verbs, prepositions, etc., and did many activities related to these concepts. All this I did as table-top activities. Although he had learned all these concepts already in the mother-child training, still I did not want to leave any stone unturned. I observed that he grasped language fast and I needed not work on grammar much. After revising the basics, I moved to the computer and made some worksheets in MS-WORD. I inserted some pictures in a table and asked Akshat to name them. The pictures were the common household items and were of three letters word. For eg., There was a picture of a bag and he had to type ‘bag’ in front of the picture. So, for that, I used to give him three separate cards of letters ‘b’, ‘a’ and ‘g’, one by one. He had to see the letter, search it on the keyboard and type it.

We focussed on this activity only for the next few days and, I observed a ‘little’ change in his typing. Still, we were far from any breakthrough. Meanwhile, I started making him practice on an online typing tutorial called ‘BBC Dance Mat typing’. The typing tutorial also helped to an extent.

At that time, whatever I was doing with Akshat, my focus used to be only the current activity and I was not expecting or targeting anything big because the last few months had been mentally taxing for me and I didn’t want to pressurize myself or him.  I had realized that if I would lose my temper it would have negative consequences on both of us. I just wanted that he should enjoy the activity and did not feel it as a task.

Meanwhile, it was 2019 and I met Ms. Simmi Vasu through a WhatsApp group. Ms. Simmi Vasu is the principal of Orane Kids School, Noida. Apart from being a special educator, she is a guide, a dear friend to me, and a real admirer of Akshat. Soon, our acquaintance grew into friendship. She guided me generously on Akshat’s typing and language issues. She was the first who identified that Akshat has understanding and comprehension abilities. (Akshat is not been assessed for any other condition and has a formal diagnosis of autism only).

 Before that, even I could not believe his strengths and thought that this might be a mind-reading (will elaborate more on this in the next post).

Well, I invited Ms. Vasu to Vadodara in January 2020 for an assessment program for the children of our Vadodara autism group. She assessed Akshat also and during the assessment, she gave a visual perception activity to him. He had to arrange some geometrical pieces according to the pattern shown in a picture card but after repeated instructions and cues, he could not do it. And that was the breakthrough I was looking for. Ms. Vasu told me that, I need to work on his visual perception as it was very poor and I realized that it was because of poor visual perception and spatial understanding he was struggling with typing. For the next 4-5 months, I worked rigorously on his perception skills and his typing improved a lot.

Now, his scanning issues has solved to a much extent but we are still working on speed. He prefers to express to any other conventional work. He express himself by chatting with me, writing poems, making sentences based on different grammar concepts in English, etc. 

We both are in the exploration stage.

Presenting here a few sentences written by Akshat as his English homework. These are antithesis sentences. Antithesis sentences have opposite words together in a sentence to give contrasting effect. Initially, he was finding it difficult to frame, so I asked him to write few opposite words first and then make the sentences. He did it that way...

7-1-22

Beautiful – Ugly

New – old

Like – dislike

open – close

near – far

1.   1. The women has beautiful heart despite the ugly circumstances.

2.  2. The new class has the old learnings.

3.  3. Likes are very important and dislikes so meaningless.

4.The window of knowledge is open but mind is closed.