hyperlexia

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I can definitely see the link between comprehension & social skills.....hadn't thought of it in those terms before, though.

oh, and i tried a word web with daughter last night....she did a little better, but still didn't get the info she was supposed to get

Ster it might take her a while to get the hang of mind maps/ word webs, but I am sure she will find them helpful in the long term once she gets into the swing of it.

The other thing you can try is relating it to real life experiences for her, if she is able to generalise somewhat, relating it back to how she might feel etc if she was placed in the same situation. It's hard to know what will work for her, not knowing how severe she is or what her strengths are. A bit of trial and error I think

i'll try to hang in there...

I often wonder how it is that those who make the curriculum could ever be satisfied with one standardized means of study, reflecting but one approach to a situation. In some areas of study there really is only one answer, but still varied ways of approaching and understanding the method of arriving at it. In other areas of study, there are endless ways of interpreting the material. And younger students don't have a broad frame of reference. My husband, who is NT, said that once in high school another student in his literature class chimed in to ask the teacher something he agreed with, which was to ask her how it was that they at their age could be expected to pick up so much obscure symbolism. And adults have so many ways of seeing one thing, especially these days with the lack of standard codes of conduct (at least in the rigid sense of previous societal norms as with the Victorians) that the misunderstandings are endless. Even if you somehow got two people together who thought exactly the same way in any given situation, their views from the inside or outside of the other's behavior would take on a totally different appearance, resulting possibly in a hypocritical reaction to something they would have done themselves. It's the stuff sitcoms and movies are made of.

And yet they say the world thinks one way, and people with Asperger's think another way. (sarcasm begin) You mean there are two ways of thinking?!?!? I thought there was only one! (sarcasm end)

Sigh. You wonder how your poor kid has a chance at all of learning anything sometimes. I've said before that epiphanies don't travel well. What turns on the cranial highbeams for one person can look like so many cheap Christmas lights to the person they try to pass it to. It's part of why cliches are so frowned upon in writing.

But it costs a lot of money and time (and teacher caring) to figure out how each brain is going to "get it" and there's the reason for so much home schooling anymore.

So that's what gets me, even though I doubt I've added a thing to the original topic. As I look at my kids who are struggling and being evaluated and such like, I just wonder if there's any point in bothering with the danged system. And yet, I wonder if I could do the job any better, since I'm just like them (the kids, that is).

irishwhistle- love your avatar....great flick !

as far as standard english curriculum goes, i do believe that inferring is an important skill. I just wish there was a way to teach her that didn't get her so darn frustrated. the answers she gives are correct answers usually- just not the correct answers.
her current issues revolve around a project on Christopher Columbus. she was supposed to read 5 articles and find 3 important facts about him ( the teacher gave her the articles to read). on the project she handed in originally, the 3 facts she used were legitimate facts from the articles- just not facts that had any substance . the teacher gave her an F, and told her that she could have a second chance to hand it in- the project was due last Tuesday & the teacher has given her until Monday to turn it in. I asked the teacher for clarification on what kind of facts she needs to include on the project & was told to find 1 fact about his childhood & 2 facts about his discovery. So on the new project I started using a word web with her- daughter reported that she had used word webs before. I had her fill it out independently. Hooboy!
the facts that she wrote down about his childhood were: he liked to look out the window at the sea. he dreamed of being a sailor. .............both true facts, but not the main idea of the articles which was to point out that Columbus' parents wanted him to be a weaver like the rest of his family before him & that it took a great amount of courage to go against his families wishes.
now, if i were to look at this as being symptomatic of AS, then i would say clearly the facts are about his parents- not about him......daughter's dx, though, is ADHD- not that i believe this, but no one else seems to think she's AS. supposedly, she's too social to be AS......
I took daughter to doc yesterday who agrees that this is not symptomatic of ADHD, & said that I should have the school evaluate her for speech and language difficulties. I've asked for this many times over the years, but have always been denied.....maybe this time they'll actually help.............

Heh. It sounds as if the teacher is jacking her over a bit by being unclear as to what the requirements actually are. The fact that Columbus dreamed of being a sailor is important. I wouldn't consider gazing at the sea to be a properly separate fact from dreaming of being a sailor, but the teacher only asked for one anyway.

I wonder how she would have performed if the teacher had asked her "What is the main idea in this article?" (a question with one correct answer, the answer the teacher is looking for) instead of "What is one important fact in this article?" That question has many possible correct answers, but the teacher is only looking for one particular one. This leads to the confusing and unfair state of being correct but being wrong anyway. Of course she's angry and frustrated.

It is and it isn't.

I was strikingly hyperlexic, and remember reading and potty-training happening at the same period. As a child of eight or nine, became obsessed with Macbeth. I could tell you the entire plot, name all the characters, and do one-man performances of exciting scenes from it. No doubt the most amusing was me, gowned in a handy bedsheet, doing the "out, out damn spot!" bit with screaming melodramatic intensity. One day at a sleepover the father of another member of my cub-sprout troop discovered this Macbeth thing and made me do the Macbeth tricks at length while all the other kids ran off to play with walkie-talkies. I couldn't get him to understand that I just wanted to go play and that his fascination was becoming increasingly frightening. Eventually I freaked out entirely, burst into tears mid plot-synopsis, and ran off to hide in a closet. After that I banished Macbeth (and the cub scouts) from my world.

Anyway, right, my point. That guy was amazed because I had read Macbeth and seemed to comprehend it perfectly. BUT, when I had to read Macbeth again for sophomore year high school English, I realised that I had missed the point. I could remember the Macbeth of my childhood. That was a description of Macbeth and a detailed and elaborate one, but it was not an understanding of Macbeth. I had to mature for five years before the complete emotional content and full meaning of Macbeth was available to me.

I had a Hemingway phase a year or two later, but by then I was hiding my reading. The contrast between reading Hemingway at eleven and reading Hemingway at twenty-five was even more surreal. I remembered the words, but the works as wholes were something completely different. It felt like the extended version of the moment when you finally 'see' the image in one of those 'Magic Eye' pictures.

I think many people have this to a lesser extent. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was assigned reading in High School for people of my age, and we all hated it then. One guy I knew in university hadn't read it in High School and said it was great, and three or four of us who'd hated and not understood it in HS read it again and, with wonder, found we agreed. It was bitter and flat at sixteen, rich at twenty-one. High Schoolers are not ready for Conrad and should be given Heller's Catch-22 instead.

ster, I think your daughter would benefit from reading with you, frequently, a lot of different things. You can read aloud a page or two, trade and have her read aloud, and during the breaks when you pass the book over, point out 'main ideas' and emotional sub-text in an "I think this, what do you think?" sort of informal conversational format. Simply repeating the exercise of picking out main ideas and making inferences about character motivations while using many different sources will probably help her pick up the knack of it.

You may not really have to worry about the material much. A lot of bestselling 'light reading' for adults hovers comfortably at about sixth-grade level.

You might want to offer her some old-timey children's classics, too. They are often more explicit about emotion and motivation. Probably because they've got connections to a period when young children were isolated from the rest of the world and social-training began later. The Wizard of Oz is not only a gem of elegant clear writing, but also has a marked tendancy to directly tell the mental states of the characters and pair those statements with the descriptions of the character's actions. You can make a game of it, as you read along try to guess what the characters are feeling, and somewhere on that page or the next, Baum will tell you the answer.

You may wish to ask the Children's Librarian at the public library for suggestions. You may have to arrange an appointment to discuss the problem at length. Children's Librarians tend to read their collections, and the journals for Children's Librarians are full of stuff about what materials match well with various levels of skill and reading and various states of emotional and cognitive development, and they acknowledge that kids don't necessarily progress evenly in these areas.

because i work in special ed, i was able to borrow some reading worksheets/books from my school to do my own informal testing of daughter's comprehension level...............I got her to try 4 stories in a mixed level book. the 1st two were 3rd grade level, teh 2nd two were 4th grade level. when i showed daughter the stories, she groaned and said "NOT THOSE!! !! we did those in 4th grade and i always got the answers wrong !" .........hmmmmmmmmmmm- you'd think the 4th grade teachers would find this important.....
she did fine on the 2nd grade level stories. the 4th grade level, however, was a different story altogether. both of the 4th grade stories had to deal with making inferences about people. in the first story ( which was 10 sentences), she declared that there wasn't enough information to answer the question..........in the second story ( which was 12 sentences), she was able to answer most of the questions correctly. i went back to the 1st story with her, and read the story out loud using different tones of voice to emphasize the characters point of view. once i read it out loud, she was able to get the answer. i decided to read the 2nd story out loud, but she was not able to correct her mistakes. ........some of this, i feel, is due to the fact that she had to try to understand what other people think/feel. 1 question which she couldn't get past was: " why did Todd go back to bed ?"- the correct answer should have been"because he was tired"....daughter answered:" well, i would have gone back to bed because it was a snow day & there was no school "- both answers were technically correct, but her answer didn't get at the heart of the character's feelings.
later today daughter & I plan to try 2 more stories ( of her choice)- without people in them. we'll see how she does.

it's quite ludicrous that i feel that i have to test daughter so that i can help her.......the school doesn't seem to be doing anything......AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA