Concrete vs. Abstract

I can relate..my daughter has ADD and severe language deficits. It takes forever to teach her science concepts. She has a hard time with inference but she has good comprehension as long as she understands the material. What works for us it so relate the new information to things she already knows. For instance tonight she didn’t know what non-living meant. She finally realized it was not-living. We were talking about living and non-living cells. She wasn’t getting it so we talked about the table, it is made of cells but they are dead, when it had live cells it was a tree and grew but now it is a bunch of dead cells and has been carved into a table. She finally made the connection but it took a while…It is hard but use pictures, examples, do lots of hands on experiments, lots of dialogue etc.. They may be able to read the words but they need to make the pictures to comprehend and utilize what they have read. Is your son on meds, how is his attention and focus?

I think Patti is right- from what I have read he will need to be taught to visualize in order to generalize-if he ever can independantly. It is probably also true that this skill is so far behind his other skills developmentally that the remediation will take a while to be useful enough for him to apply without lots of cuing. In the meantime, he will need to have those connections and genralizations constructed and taught to him. This is a real cooperative effort- usually between the parent the SLP and the teacher- who is providing the information. So my first move would be to talk with an SLP. Depending on how your son functions- most Aspbergers kiddoes that I know rely heavily on verbalization and scripting to retrieve what they know. So if the concepts are constructed and the connections/generalizations explicitly taught- and you may need to do this part- the next step would be creating a verbal routine for him to use to retrieve it. The SLP should be able to help here- and once they understand, his teachers may have some good input too- my favorite mnemonic devices came from a biology teacher:)

Robin

If I am not mistaken, Aspergers is often punctuated by weak visual skills. These children frequently don’t recognize people by their faces. I would speculate that IF a program to directly address this is feasible, it would have to be highly intensive, labor intensive and time consuming. Despite the current climate in this country of accountability (translation: demand that the school FIX the underlying neurological issues that cause the disability), I really don’t know how practical or even reasonable therapy of this kind of intensiveness is in public school, nor do i know what the ultimate success may be. Have you really thoroughly researched under Aspergers? Have you been to that site maintained at the U of Delaware (oasis or something). There is a message board there, maybe someone there has tried something that was useful.