Taking the Scenic Route

Instead of attempting to spell words, he kept drawing pictures of the word.  When the test giver would point to the paper to try and get him to spell it, he would instead keep adding detail to the picture.  lol.  The other thing he couldn’t do was “fill in the blank” (verbally) when trying to make a rhyme to a word.  I am not sure that he understood what we were wanting, but I also am not sure if he is able to make the discrimination on whether or not words rhyme.  There were a few things he was not demonstrating that I know he knows because I have seen him do it before…specifically things like “point to the bottom/top of the page”.  However, he was able to point to the correct thing on several words I did not know he understood the meaning for.  He surprised them a few times with understanding some more complex words.  He was also able to do things that he absolutely could not do a year ago, like “point to the one who is crying, point to the person who is excited, point to the one with the cap on the chair” (as opposed to under, beside, ect).  The one that shocked me the most was when they told a story, putting down a sequence of 4 pictures, and then asked him to tell them the story.  He wasn’t able to just tell the story, but when they asked him questions about the story he first used the pictures and pointed to the relevant card, and then would try and use a word, and even a 4 word sentence to answer the question.  It was by no means perfect, not really even close, but it was the first time I have seen him respond at all to a question sequence like that.  He used to just stare back and obviously not understand what they were wanting at all.  The fact that he was at least trying to respond, and doing so in an appropriate (even if deficient) manner gave me a lot of hope and really excited me.  I am so proud of him!  Heck, even the fact he can sit for a test like this is a HUGE HUGE improvement from where he was less than a year ago.

One thing that seemed to surprise them a little was that he could point out things like “point to the picture with 4 cookies/the most cookies/3 balloons” and things like that.  I would guess that was a bit unusual considering he wasn’t getting the stuff ‘around’ it in that test, especially considering he didn’t spend much more time analyzing it than it took me to determine which was the correct answer.  I think the speed might have been what was the most surprising though.  I wish I could remember what was around it, but I know it didn’t surprise me he wasn’t getting the answers on that part.

The last thing we did was the most amusing though.  It was to test how rapidly he could ‘read’ pictures.  There was a picture of a tree, a house, a book, and a dog.  The picture sets kept getting increasingly more per line, then more lines, and he was tested to see how quickly he could ‘read’ the lines.  By the second or third page, he was able to read them, not only quickly, but needed no prompt to scan from the end of one line to the beginning of the other.  On a funny note, by that time, he started singing them as he read them…going up the scale one step with each picture until he was squeaking out the word, then would drop down to the bottom of his singing range and do it again.  By the second time, the adults in the room couldn’t stifle the giggles it was so cute.  I had the advantage of long hair, that was loose enough I could just put my head down.  It was so funny.