Start of Section From “Breaking The Code To Remove The Shackles Of Autism: When The Parts Are Not Understood And The Whole Is Lost”!
Note: This was basically a complete reproduction of this section… a section with many smaller “sub sections”. See Table Of Contents for “Start/End” page numbers for this section if you have already read these materials previously.
My comments/updates would follow.
Teaching Language In Autistic Children...
Based On "Building Blocks" With Specific Order
As a watched an alphabet video with Zachary on 1/20/02, and I saw each letter flash across the screen, I thought to myself, hum..."Zachary knows his letters and indeed can read a bunch of words, yet, he is still absolutely fascinated by the alphabet and counting videos". I thought to myself that surely over time, these alphabet and counting videos would lose their appeal, but, they had not ... not after two years of watching them. As I watched Zachary, he still enjoyed these videos so much. What made the alphabet and counting so intriguing? It took me a very long time to figure it out. After a few months, the answer finally came... PARTIALITY! The alphabet and counting provided building blocks on which so much of "the whole" in life were formed. They were the "lowest" levels of language and mathematics... the lowest common denominators to so much more in life.
The more I pondered this puzzle of language and the autistic child, the more all the pieces fell into place. From this point on, I will be discussing "language" specifically, although this concept was equally applicable to teaching mathematics, or any other subject... the concept was always the same... teaching things based on a "building blocks approach" from the very lowest level up.
As I continued to ponder the question of language acquisition in the autistic child, I started to really observe everything as it related to language. I knew Zachary's problem somehow had to do with "order"... so, I thought of the alphabet as it related to order and specifically, to the "parts of a whole". Now things began to make sense when it came to the acquisition of language in the autistic child.
Just what exactly "was" the "acquisition of language" or of "communication skills"... it was the "breaking of a code". And that was the key to it all... the alphabet was at the core of communication... autistic children saw this code everywhere... and until they could "break the code", their world would continue to be one marked by great frustration.
Perhaps the best way for parents to think of everything presented in my materials as it related to the need to understand "the parts" before "the whole" could be understood, was to think of all these issues in terms of the autistic child's need to "break the code".
By this, I meant that in order to understand almost everything in his world, the autistic child first had to understand how every aspect of every part fit into the "whole". This was true in everything from language to emotions, socialization to process completion, sensory (visual, auditory, touch, etc.) input processing to issues with potty training. All these things - be they behavioral, social, emotional, or sensory - first had to be broken into their respective "parts" for the whole to be understood.
Thus, for the autistic child life consisted entirely of "breaking the code" or breaking things down to their lowest level. Once each part was understood, the whole could then be "put back together" and understood for what it was. Until that happened, everything in the autistic child's mind would be perceived as:
A when it should be perceived as B
The key, therefore was in helping the autistic child "break the code" to get from A to B... and again, this is true in absolutely all areas of life for the autistic child! :o)
There were many things that the “attempt to break the code” could explain in terms of language. Perhaps one of the most concrete and simple to understand, however, was that of the autistic child’s fascination with captions/credits at the end of a movie.