sequencing

(Photos from the Springfield Museums (in MA) from Wednesday -- I'll explain why I'm including them in this post a little later.)

Tuesday at "speech class" (which is what J calls his Speech and Language Therapy sessions, despite the fact the he really doesn't do any actual speech work, it's more language work and RDI), the talented Ms S made an important discovery while fiddling around with sequencing. She handed J index cards with key points on them about our daily trips to the lake -- you know, get in the car, walk onto the beach, enter the water, etc. -- and asked him to put them in order and tell her the proper sequence. He couldn't do it.

So Ms S demonstrated how to do it, saying "First we got in the car, then we drove to the beach, then we walked onto the beach," etc. Then she asked J to do the same thing, but in his own words. He added a couple of his own details, but basically said exactly what Ms S did, convincing her that he'd just memorized the sequence, rather than comprehending what it meant. She told me what had happened, and questioned whether it was a language problem, or a problem with episodic (autobiographical) memory. Which reminded me of something else I'd noticed -- when we get to the end of the day, we'll sometimes ask the kids what their favorite thing was that day. J always mentions whatever we JUST did, even if it was something totally ordinary or boring despite a day filled with fun activities. Ms S nodded her head and said that this definitely points towards an episodic memory problem. She further noted that his ability to memorize just about anything instantly has been acting as a strong compensation, making it harder for us to have recognized his difficulty with this. Ordinarily she would work on this just the way she started out -- with written cue cards the he could arrange in the correct order. But with his obsession (and distraction) with the written words, and his tendency to memorize the words and quote them back, she felt that another approach was indicated.

So she suggested taking photos throughout the day, printing them out at the end of the day, jumbling them up, and letting him put them in the correct sequence, then verbally tell the story of what we did that day -- that way he's not only working on sequencing and episodic memory, but also on his verbal ability to describe it.

These photos were from our first day of picture sequencing, and covered our trip to the Springfield Museums on Wednesday, where we checked out the Science Museum exhibits, played around in the Ecotarium, attended a puppet show (Jack and the Beanstalk) at the Fine Arts Museum, and played in the Dr Seuss Memorial Sculpture Garden. At the end of the day, I printed these photos (plus one more of the kids in the Welcome Center when we first arrived), laid them out on the floor, and asked J to put them in the correct order. He looked htem over and his eyes grew wide, saying "This is HARD!" but he set to work, and accomplished the task. He did make one mistake, but corrected himself as he got further along. This was an easy sequence, as it all involved one location, and were significant events during our time there. It will get more difficult as I introduce photos of the more mundane portions of our day, or more subtle portions of activities, and will increase in difficulty again at the end of the week when I take one photo from each day and have him sequence the week. He didn't have much difficulty coming up with words for the photos, although they were fairly brief descriptions and lacked the format of "first we, then we," etc. But we'll work on that.

One really cool thing from Ms S's report on Tuesday was that when J did retell the sequence to her, he put it in the form of a story (into which he inserted the memorized fact) rather than just reciting the facts back to her. So instead of saying "First we got in the car", he said "One Wednesday afternoon we got in the blue car." I was pretty excited at the proof that he's picking up on the concept of storytelling from our work with the Enki Kindergarten Curriculum. And all this work on sequencing is great scaffolding for our Enki 1st Grade year story work, where sequencing skills are worked on with the story recall.