Picture-aided talking

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I just finished a sample video clip of how I talked to my children. This particular one is a modern rendition of a story I made up 3 years ago with contribution from my daughter, when she was just about 4 years old. A magnetic drawing board was used. She was already somewhat verbal. The video is sped up to match the narration better. (I don't draw that fast!)



Of course this is a somewhat artificial setting, but at least it gives other parents an idea how I "talked" to my children with pictures. (I will be including this video clip as part of a presentation video that I am making.) The key to all my communications with my children is summarized in the acronym LIVE: Letters, Images, Voice, and Experience. Images are hand-drawn stick figures. Voice is the parent's voice. Experience refers to the experience of the children. You may think that hot air balloon, volcano, triceratops, ocean, skateboards are not part of my children's life, but they are. Where I live, we see hot air balloons all the time during warm seasons, my kids have two toy triceratops and they love dinosaurs, we live close to the ocean, we see neighborhood kids with skateboards and I also have bought two miniature skateboard toys. There are few basketball backboards in our neighborhood. Volcano, parachutes are things my kids saw on YouTube. Shark is on the wall of their preschool.

All four letters of LIVE need to be present for effective communication. You can't drop any of them. Especially you can't drop the letter E. That means that third-party, ready-made educational materials are just not as good, because they are not attached to your children's daily experience.

70 years after Leo Kanner, what I find from the web tells me that the medical field is still clueless about autism. On my side, I basically solved most issues of autism through drawing pictures. It pains me to see other families going through issues that they really don't need to go through. When I say the kids are OK, people don't believe me. But I truly see the kids as perfectly OK. I know people are tempted to parade their low-functioning kids and tell me I don't know about what autism really is. Trust me, I have seen low-functioning kids. Not only that, my son showed traits of low-functioning when he was 2.5 years old. I say these kids are OK. People mix up autism with underdevelopment. To me, the two things have nothing to do with each other. Please attack and solve underdevelopment, don't attack autism. Autistic children are fine. Development, on the other hand, is the responsibility of adults. Anyway, my main point is: communicate with your children visually, early on. And many troubles can be solved or prevented. And you'll learn to discover the genius in each one of these children.

In physics we learn that the closest temperature to +infinity is actually -infinity. The distance between a genius and a mentally disabled autistic person is actually just a split hair. Their starting point is the same. Nurture makes the difference.

In case you are curious about the making of the video, I used a cheap camera on a tripod. Voice was recorded separately and edited with Audacity (free). Video was edited and sped up using Windows Movie Maker (also free). Title frame prepared in MSPaint (again, free).

I love this. Thanks for sharing.

I also want to thank you for sharing!