Reading with a Toddler who Only Likes the Pictures (APD and the small child)

When my sweet Hailey was a toddler, she hated for me to read books to her.  Her twin brother absolutely loved it and would crawl in my lap for me to read to him as much as possible.  She, on the other hand, would crawl into my lap and put her hands on my lips to signal me to stop talking!  She just wanted to sit in my lap and look at the pictures in the books.

So I let her take the lead on these book experiences for us.  She would point to something in the book and give me that longing look of "What is that?" and I would use a one-word answer, "Train". Together we would go through the books with her pointing and either telling me or asking me what each thing was.  This was how Hailey enjoyed books for many years, and I'm sure it aided in her vocabulary development.

Sensory Processing Disorder Tips for School

(Here is another wonderful guest post: This time by an occupational therapist about Sensory Processing Disorder.)

By- Cara Koscinki MOT, OTR/L                                                                                                              

Author of The Pocket Occupational Therapist-A Handbook for Caregivers of Children with Special Needs. Questions and answers most frequently asked to OTs with easy to understand answers and fun activities you can do with your child. www.pocketot.com

Sensory processing disorders affect up to one in every twenty children and the numbers keep rising.  More research is being done to look at the causes and frequency of sensory processing disorders (SPD). In fact, the name has even been changed from Sensory Integration Dysfunction as our understanding and knowledge base has increased.  SPD is a complex disorder of the brain, which results in difficulty with processing information that comes from our senses.  It is important to realize that there are more than just the five senses we have learned about.  Information is taken in from touch, smell, vision, hearing, taste, vestibular, and proprioceptive receptors.  Vestibular receptors are responsible for detecting changes in position in space, balance, and movement.  Proprioceptive receptors provide information about body awareness, position, and posture.  Throughout our lives, we are constantly bombarded with information we receive through the eight senses and we must successfully integrate this information to make sense of it and form an appropriate response. There are times when the response we form do not match the information we have received.  For example, a student may have a panic type response when another child simply brushes against him in line.  Another example is when a student feels pain when wearing clothing with tags or seams.

Children and adults who have SPD can have successful lives.  Knowing how to adapt the environment and keep a regular "diet" of activities that provide a balance of the sensory system is important.  Seeking help from an occupational therapist is key to determining what sensory areas are hyper (more), hypo (low), or mixed.  For example, someone may be hyper-sensitive to sound and light, but not feel pain or deep touch as strongly as the person next to them.  Everyone is different and determining which specific areas are heightened or low is the key to making a successful treatment plan. 

Many hours every day are spent at school and work.  Knowing how to make accommodations and adaptations to the environment around your child can help greatly! 

Handwriting Hints

• Offer different sized grippers for children who have difficulty holding onto pencils correctly
• Use mechanical pencils for children who do not apply enough pressure to their pencil.
• Break crayons or pencils in half to help children to develop grasp.  Often, kids will hold onto the pencil with all of their fingers if the pencil is too large for little hands.
• Add a Popsicle stick or stamp between words to work on spacing.
• Use a highlighter for top, middle, and/or base lines to help children to realize where lines are on the paper.  Use a different color for each line
• Use a sticker on the top right side of the paper as a reminder of the way the paper should be positioned.
• Use colored pencils instead of crayons for children who do not like the smell or texture of crayons.

Sensory Activities for School

• Allow children frequent breaks at school for movement.  Ideas include:  doing push-ups against the wall, doing jumping jacks, or running in place.
• Give students who fidget a strip of carpet or Velcro taped to the bottom of the desk.
• Allow students to use a manual pencil sharpener
• Place heavy exercise bands around the front legs of the chair to press shins up against for resistance.
• Use chewable jewelry such as Chewlery or place heavy clear aquarium tubing onto the ends of pencils.  Giving kids input to oral muscles can be especially calming when they are concentrating.
• Pack lunches that include crunchy snacks to work mouth muscles.
• Use the smallest straws possible to drink liquids from.  Drink boxes have nice, small straws that cause the mouth muscles to work harder.
• Carry a backpack with books between classes.
• Allow students who need it to use weighted lap pads during class.  You can easily make them out of rice, beans, sand, or pellets.

Organization Ideas

• Allow students to look at a schedule for the day.  If possible, post the schedule on the student's desk or within sight.  Knowing what to expect is important.
• Ask schools to give students an extra set of books for home use.  This will cause less stress in trying to determine which books need to come home at the end of the day and will alleviate the stress/anxiety of forgetting books.
• Provide organizers or planners for students with enough space for both the parent and teacher to make notes.  This will also help with daily communication between school and home.
• Color code folders and binders by subject. 
• Provide all of the necessary supplies in a pocket or box on the desk.  Fumbling around for supplies is extremely distracting.
• Step by step directions and use of pictures when possible will help with difficulty when following instructions.   Make sure students can repeat the directions back to you.

It is important that the student is supported by a team approach.  The parent, school psychologist, counselor, and teachers must all be aware of a child's sensory needs and must know how to correctly accommodate the school for success.  No one wants to see a student fail and most importantly, children have a desire to be successful.  Every child can succeed if given the chance and it is up to us to modify their environment for success!

For more information, contact Cara Koscinski at www.pocketot.com                                                         

Her book, The Pocket Occupational Therapist can be purchased wherever books are sold.

© Cara Koscinski

Talking Holograms in Museums Can be Overwhelming for Someone with Auditory Processing Disorder

Our homeschooling social group went to a local science museum today.  My boys went off with their friends and another mom, while my daughter Hailey and her friend went in another direction with me.  Socially, it was a great experience for all of my children as they really like the kids they hung out with today.  However, on an academic level, I did notice how Hailey’s auditory processing disorder made its presence known, yet again.

This particular science museum has added a whole area with holograms that speak to you as you view the displays.  This is an amazing thing to see and really quite fascinating on its own.  It would definitely be an awesome value-added experience, EXCEPT, each display is so close to the others that you hear about 4 or 5 of them all going off at the same time.  Poor Hailey with auditory processing disorder kept saying how terribly noisy it was in there and how distracting the speaking holograms were.  So all that money and technology that was intended to make the museum experience more enriching, just made my sweet girl want to hurry out of the exhibit hall, missing more than half of what was there to see. 

I think we long for the old days of museums with displays and placards to read.  Even before Hailey could read herself, I would read the placards to my children; my one momma’s voice speaking in the rate they could process while editing out whatever words were too far above their comprehension level, was much more effective.

Empathy, Bullying, and Recalling Emotions

“I just feel what she must have felt.  It’s too sad.  I understand why she killed herself.  I felt that sad before too, when I was bullied……But I just knew I wanted to live; she didn’t!”

Wow, I was struck dumb by my sweet twelve year old girl, tears streaming down her face, her body tense with anxiety, as she said that to me.

We were watching a movie called “The Hours” about three women in different time periods.  The first woman was Virginia Woolf, the author of many books including Mrs. Dalloway.  The movie parts about her were based on her true story as known from the detailed diaries she kept.  Virginia Woolf had a history of depression and possibly was bipolar; she ended her own life by putting stones in her pockets and walking into a river, to drown herself.

We were barely into the movie when my sweet girl had this horrible episode of extreme empathy.   At her request, we turned off the movie and talked for a just a little bit before finding something fun and uplifting to watch instead.

It really hit me then how much the bullying really affected her.  It was over three years ago now, but she can recall the emotions so vividly.  She was sad, she felt lower than low, and she thought about death as an option.  Luckily, she had a strong desire to live!

We spent a lot of time working through those feelings years ago when they happened.  We focused on building her self-esteem up again and she is such a happy girl now.  I guess it shocked me to recall those feelings with her.

Now my sweet girl Hailey says she knows that “Even when life gets sad and you feel like you will never be happy again, you just have to believe that you will.  Because you will get happy again – I did!  Now I’m like this really happy person. Don’t you think Mom?”

“Yes, Hailey!  Yes I think you are a happy person and your ability to empathize with others is a precious gift you will learn to manage in time.  You can use it in your art whether it be drawing, painting, writing, baking, or even the artistry of living your life.”

Phonemic Awareness for my Child with Auditory Processing Disorder and Dyslexia

I wanted to touch on reading skills again and the immense troubles Hailey had learning how to read.  You see, I was a first grade teacher for years before I decided to stay home with my own children and I had been trained in teaching children phonemic awareness, phonics, and various approaches to reading and comprehension skills.  I used these same techniques on my own children from the beginning as I was reading to them as infants.

The trouble for Hailey started very young.  When she was just a toddler, she would get angry at me for reading to her.  She wanted to look at the pictures, but when I read the words, she would get mad and put her hand on my mouth to let me know she wanted me to be quiet.

As for phonemic awareness, she could not understand what I was asking her to do at all.  We played with sounds like identifying the beginning sounds of word: bananas, babies, bottles, etc.  I had toys to go with them; I had plastic letters; we played scavenger hunt games for them; and much more, but she just could NEVER do it.  Her twin brother loved it and picked it up like it was second nature.

No matter what I tried, Hailey just had no phonemic awareness.  To her, many letter sounds sounded all the same.  She could not tell the difference between sounds like /b/, /p/, /d/, /t/.  I was dumbfounded and had no idea what to do.  

I managed to locate a reading specialist about 40 minutes drive from our house who was a retired reading specialist from the public school system and now was offering private tutoring.  I made an appointment for her to see Hailey and give her some testing.  She had been trained in using The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing® (LiPS®) Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech and believed it would be the best solution for Hailey.

So Hailey and I started going to her once a week for an hour long lesson.  She would send home homework for us to do during the week.  The real key to this program which made everything finally make sense to Hailey was the way she taught Hailey to identify letter sounds by their oral motor sensations and the visual look when seeing someone make those sounds.  She could identify /p/ by the way the lips go together and a breath is formed at the front of the mouth and blown through the lips.  /b/ on the other hand, has a sound created in the throat that goes through closed lips and /t/ has the sound formed in the front of the mouth like /p/ but it goes through the teeth and the tongue goes up behind the teeth in front.  It sounds complicated, but for Hailey this made absolute sense and she picked it up incredibly quick.

This way of identifying sounds by their oral motor sensations and the way they look on others when being made brought Hailey the phonemic awareness she needed.  She finally could identify the different phonemes in words, rhyme words, and read words!

Not every child  with Auditory Processing Disorder has this same problem with phonemic awareness or the inability to hear the distinct letter sounds.  But if your child cannot rhyme, identify the beginning sound in words, or otherwise seems to think you are crazy when trying to teach them these things, it might be worth looking into.


-----I just wanted to add a link to the reading specialist we used in case anyone lives in the Detroit Metropolitan Area: Macomb Tutoring, LLC.

Larger, Darker Font Makes Reading with Visual Processing Disorder Easier

Good News!  

Hailey has discovered the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books and is devouring them as fast as she did the graphic novels.  She said the letters don't jump around on the pages and it's interesting and fun to read.  I think the fact that the letters are of a darker and larger font on slightly yellowed paper makes a big difference for her visual processing.

(The Diary of a Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney are in the fifth grade reading level range.  So the fact that she is a sixth grader reading them fluently - yes she is reading them at a fluent speed and not slightly slower - is wonderful!)

UPDATE: I was told the Kindle Fire enables you to change the font size and color of the text as well as the background "paper" color.  I want to find out more about people's results with using this feature, especially if you have a visual processing disorder or dyslexia.  So if you can tell me anything that might help, I'm ready to listen!

Pictures Of Hailey: Premature Twin to 12 Year Old Girl

I thought I'd share a couple photos of my daughter whom you have been reading about:

Premature Twin shown here at 13 days old: (She's the one on top.)

And now, a healthy 12 year old girl: (Her twin brother is in the background.)