Getting him to read...suggestions?

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Thank you, CubeDemon.

I appreciate the advice. I think the reason the troll in Zork bothers my son is because he is very visual (and emotionally close to being a 4 yrs old.) I think he visualizes the things he reads. He understands that if the troll has a bloody axe, that the troll must have hurt someone with it. Even if the troll found the axe and the axe was used to kill an animal for food it would bother him. (We had issues with him not wanting to eat meat for awhile because he felt bad for the animals.) He finally came around after watching the Wild Kratts episode about the food chain, and just a lot of learning about omnivores and carnivores, and I think it got him to take some emotional distance from what meat eating involves. It was not anything I concentrated on, but he likes animals and science, so I think he resolved it in his mind. Also the troll tries to kill you and you have to kill the troll, and he is not comfortable with that. Even though a troll is effectively a monster he is not OK with killing things. Not really a bad thing, you know, but it limits him game-wise. I was going to try to introduce him to D&D but I am going to have to make my own simplified version where the monster runs away, instead of being killed. Not because I am squeamish, but because he is.

He has not solved Zork. He was frustrated with it for awhile because he is at the developmental stage where he hates losing, but he resolved that by just treating it an an environment to explore. He has Googled the cheat maps they have online, and he wanders around until the wizard gets him, which has decided is kind of funny. He is OK with it because his character gets reincarnated and he has gotten to be OK with that. At some point he will probably try to play it the "right way" but we are not there yet, and that is OK with me. He has his own way of doing things and always has.

I will definitely look for those books you posted. I know the local library has the Hardy Boys Series. I will have to flip through them to see if there might be one he would like. He is not so interested in books where people talk to one another too much, or have complicated social interactions. He also likes silly humor.

I will have to check out The Time Ships. Do you have to have read The Time Machine first? The Morlocks might be too scary for him, right now.

Robot Odyssey sounds cool, as well.

Edited to add: We are probably going to end up homeschooling him next year. Things have settled out at school some. We are not in crisis mode, but he is still having some rough days. I am looking into what my options are, but I just do not see him being able to handle the difference between 2nd and third grade, unless there is some miraculous maturation that goes on this summer.

Tiredmom,

What kind of interests does your daughter have? Would she like the Harry Potter series or anything similar?

Does she like Manga? My son loves a series called Manga Shakespeare: the original language (cut slightly, in the way most plays would be) but with the visuals to help keep track of all the complicated plot issues. Lots of mature themes. There is a trend towards graphic novelizations of great books (this series is only one) where the original text is used, and that might help a lot. Here's a link for a place to start, looks like only a few of these use the original text (however, starting with the picture version might be a jumping-off place for the novels.) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/2 ... Punishment

When I was your daughter's age, I loved classic horror and sci-fi - probably in large part because they were so visual in nature. Edgar Allan Poe, the collected stories Hitchcock used as a basis for his work, Bradbury: I loved them. You have to judge whether your daughter can manage the sometimes difficult subject matter, though (if she's prone to nightmares, like I was, some of these can be intense, though nothing like what's on TV these days on a regular basis.)

No problem.



Hmmm, this does tell me that we on the spectrum have different personalities. I'm trying to understand the way he thinks. The troll isn't real. It a computer generated construct. Even if he truthfully believes he is killing anything then I have some questions to ask him. 1. Why do you believe all killing is wrong? 2. Why do you believe a computer construct is a living thing? 3. Let's say you did kill something in the game. When you reboot the game from scratch how is the Troll alive again? If the Troll comes back to life on every re-start of the game from scratch then how did you kill anything whatsoever? Do you know of any living thing that does this time and time again in real life?

These are my questions I would ask your son. I would have a socratic dialogue with your son.



That is fine.



Well, try The three stooges or Abbot and Costello. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M It is called who's on first?



I am still trying to wrap my mind around this? Why would something in a book be scary. On TV, I can understand why but in a book I don't get it.



It is more than cool. It is awesome.



I understand. With the fractions, I still do not grasp why this lady wants your child to write 2/4 instead of 1/2. 1/2 is the correct way to write it. The reduced form is correct. I agree with your son on this. How is compliance always a noble thing when he is being forced to comply to something that produces a factually incorrect answer? I don't understand this lady's thinking on this. Okay, no more derailing from me. I will go back to the compliance thread.

You make good points. The issue is that he visualizes the troll and the bloody axe in his mind. Think of a Temple Grandin-esque "thinking in pictures" kind of thing. He knows it is not real, but at the time he has an immediate fight/flight kind of instinctive response due to the visualization. The rational part of his brain is frozen at the time due to being scared. He cannot shut off the visuals. It is how he is wired. I tend to visualize as I read, also, but not to the degree that he does,


He loves "Who's on First?"



It is because he visualizes the stories as he reads and if there is something scary the instinctive functions of his brain take over, and you can't reason with him until he calms down. Then he gets it. it still makes it uncomfortable for him as it does not prevent him from doing the same thing the next time. I am assuming this response will subside as he matures, from conversing about it, and from experiences. I haven't focused on accelerating the process because it is not that much of a hindrance to anything. I am fine with him growing out of it.

My daughter will be 10 next month and also will not read. If she is made to read she will choose books with pictures, then just gathers what is happening by e pictures. She can read words, but she cannot keep up with a storyline. All the pronouns, people to keep straight, things described that she has never encountered, figures of speech, etc, etc just make comprehension too difficult for her. I have tried everything and I do mean everything. I just somewhat let it go this year. Her teacher really tried to push her but ended up giving her low level book assignments for book reports. I think my daughter's issues are memory based. She cannot read a chapter, put it down, then pick up where she left off. She cannot retain the information in memory enough to remember what was going on. She has always been that way, even when I read to her, if thereis an interruption she wants to start again from the beginning. I do believe there is some complex neurological reason for this. Her testing showed some severe memory impairment (6th percentile) for working memory. I don't think the are easy answers for some kids.

Also, I wanted to say that what is really strange is my daughter has a pretty amazing memory otherwise. She can remember vivid details about things, even going back to being very, very young. She remembers things in exact detail. But that's a different memory type I guess.

Hmmm interesting again. I don't think like that. I am more of a sequential thinker. I think in an A-B-C Fashion. Let's say I have steps A-D and I am missing C. I become stuck. Is he like that or is he more of a holistic thinker?

Check this out. http://capone.mtsu.edu/studskl/hd/LRBrain.html






My father and I both love that episode.





I don't visualize anything like what he visualizes. How does he do that? I played Zork at his age and I could not visualize the Troll or the bloody axe. Why couldn't I do what he does?

I remember in my English class and I had this assignment. Part of it required me to visualize and imagine a mountain scenery. I couldn't do that. It was too difficult for me to do. Why couldn't I do this?

CubeDemon:

I did not see visual thinking on your link. It is a right brained skill, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html

I would not say he is 100% a visual thinker, nor is he necessarily a right-brained thinker all the time. He has deficits in left-brained thinking and right-brained thinking as well as strengths in both. he is an unusual little guy.

Visual thinking happens to be one of his strengths (right brained.) I do it too, sometimes, but I am predominantly left brained. I used to be better at visualizing than I am today. I don't know why other than maybe I lost a bit of the skill, as my brain was trying to make new neuro-pathways and prune others to compensate for something else.

I understand and I don't think anyone is 100% a visual thinker. I have my strengths as well and do you know what. Paradoxically, they can be my weaknesses as well. Logic can be one of my greatest strengths but also my weakness.

Let's say an interviewer for a job asked you to "Give an example of something you failed at."

I would've answered "I failed at failing to create a tic tac toe game with an artificial intelligence player." I would've used double negation.

Momsparky and Inthistogether corrected and saved me on this one. I would've made a huge blunder if it wasn't for them. Were you there as well? I don't remember.

Do you see how logic can be my Achilles heel sometimes and weakness?

I scanned this thread quickly, so I apologize if it's already been mentioned, but I didn't see color overlays suggested & I have friends that have found them very helpful. Before the words would squirm on the page & with a color overlay the text holds still. Suddenly reading is a joy...of course, if it's reading the kid wants to do & that's been thoroughly covered.

A link...
http://irlen.com/index.php

One friend is helped by the dark orange overlay & the other by the lavender.

That's the way I am. I don't get much out of listening to audiobooks. I don't even register much of the story when I read out loud. Some books that I liked as a teen that I still like today. These are all ones that I have picked up and read again and again:

1. Catherine Called Little Bird--a book written as a psuedo journal focusing on a 14 year old girl living in the Middle Ages. The plot is a little similar to the Disney movie Brave. Birdy starts out fighting her place in society and ends with finding a way to live in her world.

2. The Iceberg Hermit--a book about a young Scottish sailor on his first voyage on a whaling ship, when it strikes an iceberg and he is the only survivor. He then lives alone for two years on the iceberg, before finding a group of Inuit to live with for another five years before finally finding a way home. It is based on the story that a Scottish sailor actually told after he had been gone from home for almost eight years. Whether he was a liar or not is up to the reader, but he did include many details about the arctic that have since been found to be right, that were the direct opposite of common wisdom of the time. He was considered a liar at the time by pretty much everyone in the whaling industry and his home town, but he stuck with the story until he died many years later.

3. The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm--This is maybe my number one favorite book. It is about a 13 year old African boy living about 300 years from now in Zimbabwe. He and his two younger siblings set out on a Scout trip using the public buses to cross the city and back home, with kind of weaseled permission. Their father is head of the nation's military/security force and there are violent gangs or were before their father took the job, so he has been super over-protective, and they've never been on a bus. They are of course promptly kidnapped, not because they were his children, but because they were vulnerable in their ignorance. Then they spend a whole year moving from situation to situation trying to get home, and end up saving the country from a threat.

4. The Pern books. My favorite, and one I think that might appeal to a teenage girl, it definitely did me when I read it about that age is the books Dragon Song and Dragon Singer. They are about a girl who is very talented, but who is oppressed by her father and society saying she could never be a Harper (oral history teacher), because she is a girl. She ends up running away, living on her own, and then is discovered by the Harpers and fights her way into full acceptance and even massive acclaim. I like all the other Pern books and pretty much everything Anne McCaffrey ever wrote, also. She has multiple series that she has written. Depending on her emotional development, you might want to check a few of them written with a co-author, some of Brainship series books are a bit harsher than the ones she wrote alone. And the very first Pern books were written in either the late '50's or early 60's, so include some male chauvinism. I particularly like the Petaybee trilogy from her non-Pern series.

5. Watership Down: This is one that is heavier. It is a long book, and it has much more serious themes to it, but I have loved it since I first read it.

6. I really liked the Xanth books. Xanth is a world created by Piers Anthony. Everything in Xanth is a pun or taken literally. So bread fruit is actual loaves of bread growing on trees, etc. Some of the jokes are pretty innuendo based. I didn't really get that so much the first time I read them, but I see it more now. Kind of like the different way I understand Shrek versus the way my kids understand it. I found them in my school library, so nothing too horrible. There are loads of these books, and all good for a lot of laughs.

7. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

8. The Jack Ryan series of books by Tom Clancy. These are always intriguing, exciting books

9. Michael Chrichton books--Congo, Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, etc. If you like the movies at all, the books are vastly better.

10. The series by Orson Scott Card that begins with Ender's Game. I actually didn't keep these. I liked them well enough, and thought it was good to have read them to be knowledgeable about science fiction works.

11. There are some Star Trek novels that I like. I, Q was a good one. Spock's World. A few others. The ones that actually look like big novels are generally good. The ones that look like they might be 120 pages long tend to be of much lower quality. A lot of it is basically just published fanfic that had little to no quality control.

12. I like the Star Wars EU X-Wing series, the second Han Solo trilogy, and the Corellian trilogy. I haven't read very much of the rest of the EU, but I love those books. I've read them probably at least a dozen times.