As I am watching Edward watch the Bumblebee pretend play video, he enjoys watching it, but he uses little pretend play. 'Experts' believe pretend play is so very important to learn. I think the video helps Edward learn how other kids learn. He is obviously learning without using pretend play. Pretend play is a way of physically imitating others. Edward learns more by looking repetitively and via brain processing. Why would anyone think Edward's way is less than a typical child's way? It keeps me on my toes though, to help him progress and understand things in this world I have to find videos and go places that he can learn by visual learning.....repetition in visual learning instead of a typical child learning by repeating via pretend play and listening.
I am terrible at pretend play. He does tiny bits like pretending to talk into a phone.... To help him when others want to pretend play with him I reword it. Like when we were doing one on one teaching for a while and our lovely teacher produced a stuffed dog and said "what does he say?", Edward looked down with a smirk on his face, I knew exactly what he was thinking. I said "honey if the stuffed dog were real what would he say?" And Edward said "woof woof"
Regarding the supposed importance of pretend play -
What are our kids learning by making pretend cookies? Pretend play is a very new and in my opinion wrong assumption as it stands now. Typical children used to do it naturally to learn by imitating their parents, but the children in the spectrum are leaders not followers, they will watch and learn fast then do their own thing.
I know many a typical child that does not seem to have learnt a lot through pretend play as children. I think this is the 'expert' bug again. I can't imagine Einstein or Jacob Barnett being more successful because of pretend play. But if you are a child that learns better by constantly having to have physical and verbal feedback pretend play would be very important.
I think people totally underestimate our ASD kids because of this belief they are dumb instead of the fact that they try teaching how verbal children learn. When you teach as they best learn (well in Edward's case anyway) they can adapt these ideas fast, they watch the videos they see real life examples and they make their own perfectly good adaptions to suit.
I use real life stuff to work on communication. Edward loves his little house but he does not play house. We use it to learn "this is Edward's house" "Edward is in this house" "Edward has shut the door", "Edward has opened the door" and Edward will stand there and open the door and say "open", and close the door and say " close". He initiates what he wants to learn.
Well when my son stops learning because I have been so careless to not force pretend play on him I will reconsider my teaching.
If pretend play is life or death, chance of living a productive life and I just have to teach it to my son, give me proof. I see many ASD kids growing up just fine without pretend play... So is it really that important? But please 'Expert's don't talk down to me and say 'it just is' when there is living proof that seems to defy it.
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Addendum - I have just been asked some great questions and my answers maybe handy for other parents.
We had a foster baby who would try to play with Edward and would parallel play. We are especially lucky at our kindy a undx (suspected) little girl has taken a liking to Edward, when he goes for the 2 hours approx I have seen her imitate Edward's movements wait for him to enjoy her company and she will natter away and include him in her play . So our own therapist. He gets lots of time to visually learn at under 5 gym on Mondays, Tuesday is kindy, Wednesday is creche at our local mall with excellent qualified kindy teachers, Thursday is small poppies, Friday Creche again and Saturdays music and dance class.
Edward pretends he is letters and numbers and gets the whole family involved in the H with him being the bar between us. He has pretended to be me when he was making fun of me tripping. He is pretending to be us when he uses the phone. ---- different pretend play. Pretend play more to learn more basic communication.
If people allow their children to play with our kids. it makes a massive difference for our children's better outcome.
I am happy to work at Edward's pace. He maybe at new entrance (start of primary school level) in scholastics, but I think he is actually using toddler level skills to understand pretoddler communication and social skills.
2 comments:
This post is interesting and doubt-raising for me.
I don't think I can have your self-confidence to go against what "the experts" say. I'm not a psycologist, not even an expert in parenting....
I wish I had the ability to understand my son's learnig style, like you did. That would be the key, I guess.
I'm not sure he's a visual learner, I see some differences between our children. But anyway, how did you discover your DS way of learning? what did you looked at?
Thanks again
Brina
Hi Brina,
I love that you question things. I think that is the absolutely most important thing for a parent with a child who is asd. If "experts" tell you that your child is mentally handycapped and you have even an inkling that that does not sound true then please please question what they say.
I think I was just extremely lucky that every time I heard or read something that said asd people were lower in intellect it did NOT sound right. Also just before I got married to hubby I was angry and asked google a question, it brought up aspergers male. I read it and said "Honey they have listed your personality", he said funny you say that, when I was at university I found that out and told my friends, they kind of ignored it and we carried on as normal. When I took Edward to see the specialist I was expecting a diagnosis of aspergers, not autism. I thought my son was intelligent and quirkey and showing all the signs of aspergers minus delayed speech. But hubby and Mother in law said hubby was slow to speak. After diagnosis and the shock of not understanding Autism at all, I kept coming across things that really did not ring true. I could not believe the experts. I was lucky to come across the book "The spark" by Kristine Barnett. And Edward was 2 years and few months by then, while reading the book I could see some similarities between Jacob (Kristine's son) and mine. So instead of doing what the experts said, my first plan of attack was to find Edward's love.
Without the book I have no idea how bad it would have been for my little man. So with lots of YouTube videos, a patient hubby and tons of toys checking his body language to everything. Well Edward is now 3 yrs and 3 months, he loves the solar system, gravity (still checking to see if the next thing will fall down), maps (inclusive of google maps) globe, swings, the trampoline, letters, numbers, words, spelling, writing, dancing, jumping, spinning, flapping and he is still only partially verbal.....not to bad for a moderately autistic little man also diagnosed with developmental delays with the paediatrician telling me there was no way of telling what the outcome may be.
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