Kathleen is 5 yrs old and she is more than moderately Autistic. She also has mutism.
Lately though we have noticed that she is trying to formulate words and if you listen closely, you will find that she almost has a language of her own.
She can say yeah on a regular basis and she uses nah for no also regularly.
She says mama, or mummy, depending on her stress level.
Occasionally she says juice but that is not really frequent enough to count.
She has what I call a patter.
It is her very own language that she uses on a regular basis and it doesn't seem to mean anything. It has no discernable words.
She has a kind of sing song melody along with her patter. We do a lot of music therapy with her at home and she will often wander around the house singing songs with different tunes that she makes up accompanied by her own words. It seems to please her and she appears happy at these times.
We have tried her with multiple musical instruments but her attention so far has not been great. She prefers to be held and have you dance and sing and will often initiate these contacts.
If the CD player gets turned on, she will make a beeline for the counter and sit and wait for you to be ready to pick her up no matter where in the house she is or what she is doing. And when she has had her fill, she will move away.
I am more likely to get tired than she is.
She actually has a very tuneful voice. She sings beautifully.
She also attends speech 2x a week during school sessions.
If we could get more speech from her, I think that a lot of her Autistic behaviours would reduce as most of them appear to be borne from an inability to communicate and the frustration that develops as a result of this.
2 comments:
Kathleen sounds a lot like my son. He is moderate to severe ADS and has apraxia of speech - but he has a great deal of control over his articulators - he has his own babble with a few words and occasionally we hear other words, which we don't hear again. We've been doing NAET treatments since January of this year. My son's tolerance for different food textures has really improved (he's eating vegetables now - yeah!) I've also seen improvement in motor planning and concentration - still not a lot of words but we keep hoping.
sounds almost identical to my sophia..she turns three in may of this year...if she could tune in to her fav song in the ipod she would...we have moved on from Vincent , American Pie , now its Holiday..... I am currently looking for a new speech therapist and have just made an appointment with NAET. we too have a blog
sophiasworld-myrna.blogspot.com....
nice to find you here xx
bless us all
Myrna
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