A Visit from the S.A.L.T. advisor

I just had a visit from a speech and language therapy advisor, who very kindly agreed to come and see us despite the fact that there is no formal provision of help to home educated children over the age of 5.

She seemed to think Zeno would benefit from speech therapy and advised me to really push for it at the child development clinic when we go there for the ADOS on Tuesday. she was also able to put a name to one of his speech 'impediments' calling it 'telegrammatic speech'.

Apparently there is an autism resource centre opening soon in Millbank, and Carolyn advised me to try and put Zeno's name down if possible. It's really for helping mild-to-moderate autistic children to make the transition to mainstream schooling, so I would have to do some research as to whether it would really be suitable for Zeno. We are quite happy home educating at the moment, although sometimes I think about flexi-schooling as he is so keen to socialise and I don't manage to get to that many home-edding events. It is tempting to think that school would be a ready-made group of friends but of course it could be a ready-made group of tormentors and bullies. This was brought home to me recently when he made the mistake of speaking to some schoolboys who were waiting outside the local shop, and they immediately started mocking and taunting. Zeno has very high self-esteem masha'Allah, but I'm not sure he would cope with that sort of thing on a daily basis.

Carolyn advised reading stories aloud (which we do sometimes) and asking Zeno questions about the characters like "how do you think he feels right now? why does he feel like that?" etc. and if necessary to provide the explanation. It would be particularly helpful to give Zeno some vocabulary of feelings and emotions, as although he has an extremely wide vocabulary it is mostly to do with facts. Also when Zeno is speaking it would be good to interrupt him and ask for the 'who, what, where and when' of the information he is giving, as his conversation often lacks structure.

Another helpful resource she mentioned was something called 'Social Stories' which are very simple stories to give an autistic child insight into how a particular behaviour issue of theirs might be making others feel. These have to be tailored towards the individual child so need to be written by me, but she said if I write something I could email it to her and she will advise if it is suitable.

It all sounded very interesting and I am keen to make a start insha'Allah. It was really good to speak to someone who was actually able to give advice rather than just 'assess' Zeno without giving us any feedback, which is what has been happening since January.

As she was leaving Carolyn said that Aspergers definitely seemed to be indicated but she was very positive about improving his pragmatic speech difficulties with the strategies she mentioned.