Self-taught reader?

All children are amazing!

They are fascinating to watch as they learn and grow. It is always exciting to discover a child's individual interests and talents and watch as they find ways themselves to develop those interests and those talents. Some children love to sing, some love to paint, some love to kick a football. Kal-el loves to learn. Like all children, he is a sponge soaking up information from the world around him even though it might seem a little different to him. If you watch his face when he discovers something new, you will see his eyes, actually his entire face, light up.....and then he'll break into his jig!

We spent the first 3 years of Kal-el's life watching a channel called BabyTV. It is designed specifically for young children and there are no advertisements to ruin the viewing time for them. Kal-el would want to spend hours and hours watching this channel daily. (Some of you are already judging my parenting choices! That's ok, because I understand that if you are "tutting" at the fact I allowed my son to watch hours and hours of tv each day then it's most likely you don't have much experience with special needs children in your own home.) What some people will see as a complete waste of time, I can now look back on and see as a lot of learning time.

For most parents who take the time to teach things like numbers, colours and shapes to their very young children, along with simple concepts such as being friendly and kind, there are many different tools to use such as books, songs, games etc. So what if your child won't let you read to them, or sing songs to them or play games with them? Well you find something that does work! For Kal-el it started with BabyTV. Bright colourful characters caught his attention. Repetitive sounds and music kept him interested. Some of the short programmes had no dialogue so he wasn't trying to understand what was being said but learned to understand what was happening because of the pictures on the screen. Eventually, he also began to watch Peppa Pig. I don't even know how that started. In all the giving out that is done about Peppa, I have to say that Kal-el definitely increased his vocabulary because of her. However, for Kal-el this also means "scripting" entire episodes of Peppa's adventures. "Scripting" is delayed echolalia. This means that Kal-el will repeat the words or phrases that he has heard usually from a tv show. He might walk around the house replaying an episode of a tv show in his mind and speaking out the script. Sometimes Kal-el might say a phrase that he has heard from a tv show that relates to an activity that he is doing or that is going on around him. When he is in full flow, he is doing it as a self-stimulation and doesn't want anyone to interact or interrupt him. But it's still "talking" and that's important!

At some point we progressed on to using YouTube at shorter intervals during the day once he could handle a phone without much danger of dropping it or breaking it. Somehow, probably through searching, we came across a channel called "Duck Duck Kids TV". Now, I don't know what it is about these short animations, but children seem to get sucked in by them. Egg-shaped animated beings with weird voices obviously catch children's attention, and they certainly caught Kal-el's. When Kal-el eventually began to talk he would repeat everything he heard them say on these short animations. He learned all of his colours, shapes, numbers 1-20 and concepts of size such as big, bigger and biggest from watching those egg-shaped weirdos! He would sit for a couple of hours per day watching them until he had committed it all to memory.

After some time he would get fed up watching the same stuff and somehow would manage to find other videos that he enjoyed. For a while it was videos of kids enjoying water slides. Then kids opening Kinder Surprise eggs. Dogs bursting water balloons. Cats frightened by cucumbers. I realised that he was just soaking it all up. I searched for learning videos and came across a series called "Endless Reader". This appears to be a computerised learning game that someone has videoed and uploaded onto YouTube. Kal-el quickly got hooked in. The video teaches sight words using phonics, animations and colourful characters. Every now and then when he was watching cats fall into swimming pools or whatever, I would quickly change it to the endless reader video and he would watch it for maybe an hour. I wouldn't watch it with him. I wouldn't talk about what was on the video. I wouldn't try to teach him the words. I would just let him watch the screen.

A couple of weeks ago the family were having lunch in the kitchen. Kal-el had finished eating and went to sit on the edge of Lexi's buggy. He could see a Tesco's shopping bag. Derek and I were in a full blown conversation. Gradually, I began to hear what sounded like Kal-el reading, so I stopped talking to listen. Yes, he was indeed reading the writing on the back of the shopping bag that talked about the farm that certain produce came from. I was quite taken aback. You see, he wasn't just recognising the words, he sounded out the word "farm" because he understood the phonetic sounds of the letters. Of course none of us could get our phones out quick enough to capture the moment. Typical.

A couple of days later I found some sight word flash cards online using my laptop. I decided I would test him out "reading" the sight words and record him using my phone. You can check out the video below. I was so happy. My special needs son had taught himself how to read using YouTube!!! It just proved to me how intelligent he really is.

When we hear the word "disability" we often form an idea in our heads of someone who cannot use their brain correctly thus making them to be of low intelligence, slow to think, unable to think properly. Autism and related disorders are considered disabilities. This may mean that people lack in the ability to move physically, communicate effectively, complete activities. It doesn't mean they are not intelligent. In fact, it can quite often be that a child on the spectrum displays high intelligence.

There aren't many "normal" children that I know of that are self-taught readers!

Chances are that autistic people use their brain a lot better than you and I do.

Worth thinking about the next time you get to be around someone "special".