Do you still read to your children once they are proficient readers themselves? It’s true that they may read just fine independently and that should be encouraged, but let’s consider some of the benefits of listening to someone else read. When you listen to a good narrator, you learn how to pronounce words you [...]
In a family where three out of five members have been diagnosed with AD/HD, it is not unusual to hear frequent reminders back and forth. These prompts are necessary, since forgetfulness and becoming distracted are daily (if not hourly) occurrences. What’s frustrating is when the distractible person is reminded to do something he had actually [...]
Research has shown that strong emotions make memories stronger. Likewise, if you can connect something familiar and chain it to new information it will be better understood and more likely to be retained. For a child with Asperger’s or any child who has a particular area of interest, you are probably finding ways to tie [...]
Do you have a child who can tell you (in great detail) about a movie he saw months ago, but can’t remember what it was that you sent him to get from his room? Can your child quote lines from a movie she’s seen one time, but can’t recall what you just told her to [...]
Today’s blog is a message of hope for all of you with distractible, inattentive, and forgetful children. It may also, in a way, be making a case for attempted brain washing used totally in the sense of “for the greater good.” I’ll let you decide. Yesterday my daughter Beckie and I were talking about things [...]
Beckie and I finished reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and I wanted to give her a non-traditional assignment in addition to traditional assessment measures. So I went through two week’s worth of advertisements from the Sunday newspaper and cut out pictures that could be tied in somehow to a line from the play. For example, [...]
Josh and I find ourselves in a new stage of our relationship as mother and son. I am now middle-aged and he is a young adult. My goal, as always, is to encourage Josh to greater independence in his use of strategies to help his weak executive functions. His goal is to use me as [...]
No, not THAT miracle! I’m talking about Beckie’s fish, a pet Beta she keeps in a wall-mounted bowl in her room. It’s not that she doesn’t like the fish or care what happens to it. It’s just part of how her AD/HD manifests, that she can remember the daily task of feeding the fish but [...]
I’ve heard that individuals with autism think in pictures, not words. Temple Grandin has even written a book (Thinking in Pictures copyright 1995 Random House) describing her very visual way of viewing and interpreting events. My daughter, Beckie, has learned to compensate for the deficits in her working memory by visualizing what she is hearing [...]
All children forget things they’ve heard now and then, but for some children forgetfulness happens frequently and is problematic. Parents of the chronically forgetful are faced with the difficult task of trying to determine if their child is genuinely not retaining information or is being willfully non-compliant. One way to determine if memory issues are [...]
