Tyler

Tyler is an 8 year old boy in the 3rd grade.  He is autistic and nonverbal.  I first met Tyler when he was in kindergarten, about 2 years ago, when his mom was looking for someone to help him with letters, words, and writing.  I was still a student when I met Tyler and his mom,and extremely nervous since I had never, until this point, worked one on one with a child diagnosed with autism. I knew about autism, and had written papers on autism, and even consulted with a teacher on how to adapt her classroom to better accomodate one of her students who was diagnoed with autism.  But I am certainly no expert, and this was (and continues to be) a learning experience. 

Because Tyler is nonverbal, it is difficult to guage how much he knows.  Two years ago I started out with matching words to pictures and discovered that he could read some words simply becuse he could match them without my saying anything.  Such as matching the word 'red' with the actual color. (I'm sure his teachers knew this, but it was new to his mother and I).  Since then, we've gone from matching words to pictures, to matching sentences to pictures, and onto spelling words and forming sentences.  Tyler is an incredibly bright boy, and he was able skip the second grade this year and move right into third grade.

For the past few weeks, Tyler has been working on forming short sentences using small cards with words on them (like 'We' 'go' 'to' 'the' 'I' 'make' 'a' 'run') as well as some pictures of things such as a store or a sandwich.  We also work on spelling these words, as well as others.  Many of the tasks are in matching or chart format, since that seems to be the most effective way to instruct Tyler (and to know how much he knows).  For spelling, Tyler is given a piece of cardstock paper with two attached boxes for two letter words, or one with three attached boxes for three letter words.  Tyler is then given several squares of paper with one letter on them each (I make these squares to fit perfectly into the boxes; if they don't, Tyler spends extra time trying to make them fit...this can induce stress for him, which makes him less inclined to want to work with me).  Tyler struggles with spelling, since it involves blending the different sounds in words.  When given letters to choose from, and given a sound, Tyler is able to correctly choose the right letter associated with the given sound.  However, when told to spell a word, he becomes frustrated ad stalls until the word is repeated and broken down into the separate sounds.  Having the letters available to choose from helps him a little, and last week he was able to spell 'to' 'we' 'go' 'is' and 'fun' without any prompting and assistance from me.

Tyler's teacher and speech pathologist have also indicated that Tyler needs to work on forming his own sentences (such as telling about something he did recently), as well as being able to answer "who" and "what" questions.  For the next few weeks we will be focusing on these two things, as well as spelling three and four letter words.