Family Science Night

We had a great time at Family Science Night at Javi's school.  They did a great presentation!  They had different buildings set up with different scientific centers.  Building F, which is Javi's class building was set up with the body exhibits, another was set up with physics, another was set up with chemistry and the multi-purpose room (their auditorium) was set up with the solar system, planetary and world exhibits.  We really felt like we were at an actual museum they had put everything on so nicely!!  I was really impressed!

All the exhibits were interactive.  Kids could run experiments like look at their eyes in the mirror through a magnifying glass, measure the small intestines, do forensics on their finger prints, magnetic energy, and they learned why popcorn pops.

Javi's fav was putting iodine on the crackers to see how the digestive system breaks down food. Ethan's fav was the popcorn.  They also got a bag of really good popcorn at that exhibit ;)

My personal fav was the eco exhibits.  It taught kids what material were recyclable and which could be tossed.  They even had a trash/recycle basketball game where Javi won a pencil.  

It was really neat!!  I'm so glad that Javi invited all of us!  Javi got to go out for dinner with his step-mom & dad right after, so he got to learn about the digestive track first hand.

Teacher Appreciation Web Project

Well, the hubs and I are all finished with the site. I think it looks nice. It's simple, but it does what we need it to do. It took us about eight hours from start to finish. I will email a link if anyone wants to see the live site. I just didn't want to post it in a public forum since it's only intended for the parents of the class and has a live form that acts similar to making a reservation with no moderation.

Still have a million other things to do this week and next. We are doing door decorating and kids are going to make pen flowers and a mosaic pot, so I still have to have my creative juices flowing. I am also going to make her a mosaic garden stepping stone as part of her gift.

It was a fun project and best of all I got to work with my darling husband on it. That made it fun :)


Teacher's favorite color is green, so we made the site green. Tree is part of the theme "Branching out in Mrs. Morrison's class for the door decoration.


Mark's form came out really nice. The error messages fade in, if something is not filled out properly. It posts the reservation below like commenting and it sends an email to me and a confirmation to them. It's pretty cool. It also has security features that protect against packet injection and spam bots. Go Mark!

Teacher Appreciation Week, May 5th-9th

Teacher Appreciation week is just around the corner, May 5th-9th. Don't forget to show your kid's teachers how much you appreciate them. Especially those who work with our special needs children. It takes a special kind of person to do their job everyday. Think of how we feel with our SN kids home on vacation and just think, they deal with 8-12 SN kids in their classroom almost every day!! Also, don't forget their wonderful support staff, the aides, student teachers, volunteers and specialists.

It takes very little to show your appreciation. A homemade card, some homemade cookies, a single flower, a gift card to Starbucks for a coffee, even a McDonald's gift card (You deserve a break today, is one of their slogans).

Just wanted to get the word out there. I hope you take the time and effort to recognize your child's teacher in a special way :)

Parent Education Night for Children on the ASD Scale

Tonight we attended parent education night. It was interesting to hear the other parent's stories and what they have tried to counteract difficult behaviors. The information presented was interesting, however, I think the lecture was a little hard to follow. Sometimes people that are experts in a particular field, forget that the lay person has a hard time understanding all the jargon. When you are relatively new to the diagnosis, you just want to know how to help you child with out having to learn a new language. Although hearing about artificial consequences and differential reinforcement is interesting. Listing it in a flow chart to keep us newbies on topic, would probably not help. Learning all those terms is an afterthought when your child can't make it through a grocery store run with out throwing themselves on the floor and screaming.

Fortunately, that is not the case for our family these days. Javi has really made a lot of progress over the past few years after using many of the techniques suggested by ABA. However, I must stress that you have to find what works for your child. ASD children cannot be put in to a box and categorized. What works for one child, will not necessarily work for another. The best advice I can offer that is more a "real world", realistic technique that can be applied to nearly every avenue of your life:

Recipe for Success for your ASD Child
-----------------------------------------------------
ADD:
time
a heaping cup of patience
a generous portion of love and understanding
a tablespoon of the professional techniques

Blend until you get the right consistency.