need some help/ideas...

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Hello everyone

I need some help and I am hopeing I can get some ideas.
Two weeks ago we had parent/ teacher conferances. Every year it has been the same thing, except this year he loves his teacher and loves going to school (teacher has an autistic grandchild so she has been WONDERFUL to our son.) Every year I am told the same thing... ds has wonderful writing skills, being able to write and make up stories but trouble with handwriting and he HATES to write by hand. I have been trying to get him to learn typing.

Son wants to type but he thinks he should be able to type fast right away like mom even though I have told him that I have had to practice alot! Teacher said that since ds hates to write he will cut his stories very short, but what he does write ends up "blowing her away" (this is said by every teacher so far.) He is in 3rd grade.

I asked his teacher then what we could do other than teaching him to type to help unlock his potential because I know that there is ALOT of potential in him that is just pent up. She told me that she didn't know! She is the teacher! She even agreed that there was alot of potential in him. How can I help him if even the professionals do not even know how to help him?

We have had his IQ- tested twice and according to the doctor his reading skills are that where doctors and professionals like that should be at... he said that ds's score was "phenominal" in that area, but because of an inconsistancy in one of the areas of the test they could not reach an overall IQ score. Something to where he tested high but should have tested higher due to findings within the test.....??????? Hmmmmm.

DS has not been advanced with his reading through the school because and ONLY because when they test them for reading and comprehension they have the child read the story and then the child has to tell the testing person about the story from beginning to end. With my son they have to prod him for information about the story. DS will tell them about facts if there were any with in the story... he mostly likes factual books, but he will not run down the story for them..... even though they know he knows what he just read. So ds is stuck reading material that I know he is well beyond. The stories they send home for homework are a joke. The teacher wants them to take 30 minutes to read the story and my son has it done in less than a minute and complains about how stupid the story was:)

Sorry this is long but I just don't know what to do. I am so frustrated when it comes to the school right now... I need some advice. Thank you! Kristen

Even if he did learn to type, his fingers probably couldn't keep up with his brain anyway. I'm in a similar situation with my child and we've tried dictation, but I can't type that fast (and I'm pretty fast). We tried a tape recorder and that went pretty well, but it still needs to be transcribed.

Reading comprehension answers are a learned skill. Even though the stories are beneath his level, he needs to find a way to learn that regurgitation for testing.

sparknotes.com offers literature study guides - my 10-y-o is currently working through The Lord of the Rings trilogy and I use the study questions from there to orally prompt him on what he's read. It's not quite the essay question prep some students might be doing, but it's getting him to think along those lines.

There's also bookadventure.com which has a huge library of titles with on-line quizzes. That might also help him learn how to answer the reading comprehension questions.

Thank you I will look into those websites and try the tape recorder and dictation at home.
Problem is alot of the writing has to be done in school and the school said that if he would learn to type they would provide a word processor so that he could start doing his work that way.

I just feel like there is more that I need to be doing for him but just do not know what else I can do to help him. Thank you for the great tips!

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you say he has wonderful writing skills~does he verbalize what he is going to write ?
maybe he could record what he wants to write into a tape recorder, and someone could transcribe it for him?

My DS wants to type but wants to do it his way (hunt & peck) - we already have a typing game here, but he prefers TyperShark. The deluxe version is $20USD, there's a free, limited download and it can be played online at Shockwave.com.

It is more fun than the old "Quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" style that I learned years and years ago.

We keep trying to encourage him to use correct finger placement, but we haven't been very successful yet.

I keep thinking they'll get the speech-to-text refined and by college age, he will just talk to whatever version of computers they have then.

Most schools will provide an alphasmart, if not an actual laptop (the alphasmarts are *much* more durable for kids).

My son hated the first day of typing class, because he wasn't faster than the teacher! At the end of week one he was typing 35wpm (I think that was what I was doing at the end of my first year!) and now, 6 weeks later, he's at about 90wpm. I think being part of the video game generation made learning to type a much easier skill - he was already used to not looking down at his hands.

My oldest child wrote a book in elementary school (a rather long, chapter style book) which she did by dictating it and I transcribed it in the evenings. Saturdays we edited. She was in a program for kids with exceptional language abilities called PEN.

My youngest child (these are both girls and both NT, btw) is also just going into a gifted program, her grades average 97-99 in all subjects and she reads voraciously. I had her pulled from a teacher's class when the teacher said she was recommending speech therapy as my child was barely reading above the second grade minimum speed (44 wpm) verbally. We changed teachers, she's been tested weekly and never tests at less than TWICE the minimum speed.

My DS, who is my aspie and has a higher IQ than either of his sisters, often barely gets by on his grades because his school is so centered on answering it *their* way, not getting the right answer.

My point being the wrong teacher can ruin your child's chance for success. Any teacher who's been in the classroom more than a day who can't come up with one solution to a problem - she's the problem.

I have AS and still can barely write. I always type. My son has PDD-NOS and is getting an alphasmart from school (he is 13). He still can only print. It's a fine motor skill and many on the Spectrum have a lot of trouble with that. Sometimes it gets better, but often you need to use accomodations in this area. My son has his tests read to him by his aide and the answers are recorded by her. He has a terrible time getting "the big picture" in a story, but ASDers do have that problem, and often it is lifelong. We see details rather than the big picture and get bogged down. I'm not sure what to do about it because I still have that problem and so does my son, in spite of having every good intervention available to him. My son is an excellent factual/rote learner. Abstract thinking is not his thing. He is extremely literal. I am too, but not as badly. Still, I'm bad