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First Day of School Take 2
Wednesday Fargo Public Schools started their first day of school thanks to COVID-19. It seems like everyone I know across the US and across the ocean (in Saudi Arabia) has already been participating in virtual school for at least a week or two already. In general, I feel like North Dakota has been a few weeks behind everyone on everything COVID related (probably because we fall 47 out of 50 in population size in the United States). And that’s okay. I (personally) need that extra time to mental prepare for all the changes that are happening, and I appreciate watching and learning from everyone else who has started the “new…
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Ave Verum Corpus
When I was about eight or nine, I remember standing in the middle of my classroom choir on our first stop of our little elementary school musical tour, wanting to crawl in a corner and hide. I knew every single note of the song we were about to sing, but I didn’t know any of the Latin besides the first three words: Ave Verum Corpus. Being good little Canadian kids, this was about the same time we were also learning French. Boy did I love French–I was really, really good at French. I was the master of the weekly French dictee. Not only was I really good at learning language,…
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The Autism Influence
It’s sometimes hard for me to separate the autism influence from our lives outside of autism. It always takes some shape or form in my writing. I write about autism on a weekly basis on this blog. Even though my current novel takes place in World War II and has nothing to do with autism, there’s still a character in there who struggles with mental health difficulties and I’m constantly reflecting on our own experiences to help me understand my character’s motivations better. That autism influence is always in the back of my mind. Steve has his own version of the autism influence too, and for him it started with…
- autism, Education, family, high school, IEP, milestones, motherhood, siblings and autism, teen years
The four year plan
W is the second child in our family, so it’s really rare (as a parent) to experience something that I haven’t experienced with J. In grade 3, J’s whole class made gingerbread houses before winter break, so I knew that when W hit grade 3, she’d be doing gingerbread houses too. When J started touring with the elementary school choir at the mall and rest homes, I knew when W got to that age, she’d be doing it too. When J graduated from elementary school in a “classic” coming of age ceremony with a field trip to the zoo, followed by a graduation slideshow with cake and lemonade, I knew…
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Some weeks…
Funny not funny story. Last week and a half has been a little rough. And as I started to write this blog post, I started thinking, hey…last year–at this exact very time–was rough. Last year J had an epic meltdown the day after election day. In fact, he got kicked out of school and I had to bring him home early. And then I remembered, hey…when did I write that post about being in the mid-semester slump? 2 years ago at around this exact time. Guess what happened this week? any guesses? J got kicked out of school for behaviour this Thursday. At this point, I’ve determined he’s an unpredictable predictable…
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Adaptations and Modifications
It’s been about a month since J’s IEP meeting and I’m really excited about some of the ideas the team came up with. I guess that’s what happens when you get over a dozen people in a room to discuss J. The hard thing about J is that there is no academic setting he really fits into. J is what I call “middle autistic.” If you think of a line graph where “low functioning” is on one side and “high functioning” is on the other, I would put J smack dab in the middle. So where do you put an “in the middle of the spectrum kid” in the public school setting? He would be…
