Book Review

[mamashark]

These books were loaned to me to review over the break by an SLP (who does not work with my son, but who knows and works with my husband and has heard our son's story and knows I homeschool). Peterpan asked me to give my thoughts on them for your benefit... if you aren't familiar with the books.

First up: Autism & PDD Things I Can Say and Do by LinguiSystems.

In general these are workbooks that give you 2 pages: a web for ideas on what to say, and a web for ideas on what to do. Worksheets include one filled in with ideas and one blank for a child to fill in. In the back is a letter to parents and a web progress chart to keep track of what webs the child has worked through. Intro includes a how to use guidelines that tell things like how to be functional and promote conversation.

I got to look at the following books in the series:

Holidays (including MLK jr., Rosh Hashanah, Kwanza, valentines day, Passover, etc.)

Weather,Seasons, & Months (weather includes hot, cold, rain, sunny, snowy. All 4 Seasons and all 12 months)

People & Places (including common people that children see: classmates, parents, teacher, friends, a new person, pets, stranger. and common places: lunch, recess, school, movies, mall, grocery store, etc.)

Feelings & Actions (all basic feelings including tired, sick, and hungry; actions common to every day including games, computer time, mealtimes, etc. Also includes getting lost, in trouble, when hurt...)

My personal opinion on these books: I might be downplaying the importance of the idea, but to me it feels like promoting heavy scripting. These are not things that I personally feel would benefit my son in such a highly structured setting, and would prefer to give him similar ideas/lessons through conversation about an upcoming event/time/whatever. For example, we will discuss going to see a Dr. and look her picture, talk about what she does, what she might say or do, what we might be able to ask or tell her, etc. I think the other ideas might be better discussed through the use and discussion of picture books as we read, or again, through conversation about life as it happens to prepare/solve problems. I also feel like the discussion on the webs might be to far removed from the experience itself that they are supposed to prepare the child for, at least in my son's case.

 

Next up: 204 Fold & Say Social Skills by Super Duper.

these are reproducable pages that are meant to be copied, folded and colored by the child. For example, one is Needing someone's help with a picture of tying shoelaces. Page 2 is a more in depth picture of a boy trying to tie his shoes with an uncertain look on his face and a sentence telling what is going on. Page 3 is a box and lines to draw a picture of what happens next. Page 4 is a list of 5 questions to discuss the topic with child. Summarized, the questions read: What can he do, who should he talk to, what will this person do, what should he say after that, how will he feel after he gets help? 

My thoughts: This is a great book for someone working with a large population because it gives you a lot of scenarios to work through and a set script that makes the discussion easy. For use in the home setting, probably not as useful. I would never think to flip through this book to find a random topic to pull out and use as needed. Again I would probably talk about these things as they happen in life, and I often try to teach these skills with positive reinforcement rather than paper and pencil. For example, after prompting him to ask for help (which I have to do a lot) I would say, "Thanks for asking for help! I love helping you!" or "I love how you say thanks and gave her a hug, it made her feel so special"

 

Next book to be continued in comments...

[mamashark]

Next book: The Language of Perspective taking, by Marilyn Toomey and Circuit Publications 

This is a 5 part book, starting with taking another perspective based on physical conditions. 2 pages per topic: page 1 includes a half-page picture and a short story. Page 2 includes a list of questions to think through the picture and story and asks questions that have the child try to think about the people's perspective in the picture. 

Part 2 is associating a causal event with an emotion or feeling. It includes several pages of expressions with definitions of each emotion. then a single page per topic showing a picture of an event (girl looking in window at bike) and a short couple sentence story explaining (it's the bike of Megan's dreams). Another part of the page shows what Megan is thinking with a thought bubble (riding bike) and words (she is hopeful...) final part of the page asks 3 questions. (Why could she be hoping for the bike...? Do you think she feels there is a good chance she will get the bike...? If she does not get this wonderful bike, what do you think she might hope for?) **My opinion here is that the language is weird. I tried to give examples of the language structure that I didn't like in my example - I would probably reword all these questions if I were using this book. 

Part 2 ends with a list of other ways to describe each feeling.

Part 3 gives examples of how different people can experience the same emotions through different experiences with pictures and thought bubbles and such.

Part 4 shows how 1 event can impact many people in different ways. (not everyone experiences the same emotion at the same event). (btw, the picture of the wedding shows the best man was upset because he was in love with the bride, the maid of honor who was depressed because she was in love with the groom, the camera girl who was unsure because she was using an untested camera, the mom of the bride who regretted everything she didn't do with her daughter, the dad who was proud of everything he and the mom did right to raise her, and the kid who was bored and hungry and unhappy...at least the bride and groom were happy anyway...but this page alone is enough for me to not spend money on this book.)

Part 5 is a match the statements to learn how you can experience conflicting emotions at a single event. (eg. being disappointed that there's no chocolate pie and being happy that you didn't consume the calories...)

I felt like this book had A LOT of emotions and pictures of emotions and I really am sick of books that want to teach emotions from facial expressions done in black and white. For us, we have a lot of groundwork to cover before the topics in this book would be helpful.

[mamashark]

I honestly didn't look through the Ready-To-Use Social Skills Lessons & Activities for grades 4-6 book from the Social Skills Curriculum Activities Library. We're struggling to use grade level social activities and he's 5. So it wasn't really worth my time. Flipping through it it looks like a worksheet driven resource that gives steps for how to do something (eg. reacting to change) with a story base, specific steps to take, then a worksheet for them to apply the skills to a new scenario. It does look like ideas are given for a variety of teaching methods including role play and discussion. 

Next book is Room 14 A Social Language Program by Linguisystems. I actually made a note of this book in case I run across extra money and want to throw it in this direction. I do like how they focus on specific skills but we are not ready for this yet. For example, for using self-control there is a page for how to cool off from strong feelings, how to have happy thoughts to keep you from "blowing up at someone or saying something unkind" with a thought bubble to color, ideas for how to stop, look, listen, and think, etc.

Basic topics covered include making and keeping friends, fitting in at school, handling your feelings, using self-control, being responsible. There are a variety of worksheet pages but again we're looking at black and white drawings of emotions.......

Last book is Telling a story by Marilyn Toomey. This looks like a writing book, and could be used in a language arts program. Part 1 is telling a story (basic sequencing with several story examples accompanied with pictures to separate each part of the story) Part 2 is characters (physical and personality traits and feelings) setting (places and times), inferring character and setting, reverse inference, story beginnings, characters' responses, attempts to resolve conflicts. Part 3 is telling your own story, writing your own story, story starters, titles, pictures. For narration, I much much prefer the Mind Wings sequence and breakdown. I feel like this book would be more useful for my older daughter who doesn't have issues with narration, and would be purely a language arts writing tool. It is interesting to me that the preface to the book shows that this book was developed for children whose language skills are not developing as expected and who therefore have difficulty developing "storytelling skills". The idea behind the book is to help improve "storytelling" and thus "sharpen an important tool for information retrieval" and develop a means of expressing her imagination through storytelling. I don't know... it just seems out of order after working with MindWings Braidy material.

 

And there you have it! That's what I got to look at!

[PeterPan]

7 hours ago, mamashark said:

First up: Autism & PDD Things I Can Say and Do by LinguiSystems....

My personal opinion on these books: I might be downplaying the importance of the idea, but to me it feels like promoting heavy scripting. 

Ok, considering I'm such a HUGE fan of the Linguisystems stuff, I'm embarrassed I haven't looked at these! And I get where you're coming from on the scripting question. On the other hand, how much original expressive language is your ds using? Is he actually SAYING these things already? With my ds, what I find is that he says unexpected things because he doesn't know the appropriate things. Also there's the issue of language organization. So looking at them from where my ds is *now* I think I could find a way to use them that isn't so much about scripting as about organizing the brain to have a bank of all the things that are EXPECTED to say there vs. things that are unexpected. And since my ds can say some really unexpected things (like walking up to someone and asking if they used hand sanitizer when what he means is you're pretty and what's your name...), I like it. Is there a cd in the book? If there is, save the files so you can throw them on an ipad to use later, when the time is right.

7 hours ago, mamashark said:

Next up: 204 Fold & Say Social Skills by Super Duper.

I have a different Fold & Say book, and what I did with it was to print the whole jolly blooming book. I can't remember but it might have been a printed book that I had to turn the pages on, one by one. Hate that. Anyways, I found that it could catch some of his skill holes but wasn't necessarily the most durable or contextualized practice, something that was going to generalize over. It was a book on wh-questions, so it gave us mass practice but not best practice. But it's also just a hard topic. What you might do, if the book has a cd, is again just throw it on your ipad and do 1 a day, with a view not so much to having the result be amazing as waking up the *concept* in his brain. I'm not really keen on that kind of overt SLP social skills instruction, because that IS where you get that scripted, memorized response that isn't contextualized or flexible. 

7 hours ago, mamashark said:

Next book: The Language of Perspective taking, by Marilyn Toomey and Circuit Publications 

Marilyn Toomey stuff is classic, but I get what you're saying! And you're going back to my point, that SLPs are being told to work on end products (emotions, etc.) without being given tools to address the REASON the kid is not catching on, like INTEROCEPTION. So imagine if you did this Toomey series *after* working on Interoception through phase 3 of the upcoming curriculum. Then how would it look? Probably much better. Probably you could even do this during phase 3 and have it be really sharp. By that point they'd have done body scans and learned how to notice those same things on others, so they'd be getting so much more information from the pictures.

6 hours ago, mamashark said:

Next book is Room 14 A Social Language Program by Linguisystems.

This is interesting, because the language they're using parallels the work my behaviorist has been doing with ds. If you used it as a *reference* for yourself, could be interesting. Does it show the worksheets in the manual or only on the cd? Again, if the book has the cd, you might download them. It might be as the demands increase you'll see things you want to target with these.

6 hours ago, mamashark said:

Ready-To-Use Social Skills Lessons & Activities for grades 4-6 book from the Social Skills Curriculum Activities Library.

This looks like it would fit where ds10 is at EXACTLY. You could look at the book for gr 1-3 and see what you think. Again, I think it's that as the dc gets older, the demands increase and the issues become more apparent.

6 hours ago, mamashark said:

Telling a story by Marilyn Toomey.

This is probably where I found her. The MW stuff is kind of rigid, which sounds comforting but isn't necessarily flexible. You might look at the Toomey topics (haha) and see what narrative stages they cover. It looks like Toomey is hitting descriptive and action sequences in part 1, reactive in part 2, etc. You might then see where they overlap and where Toomey is contributing something MW doesn't hit. (reverse inferences, in medias res, etc.)

Well what an interesting list! I can see where you're like wow, maybe not what I need. But for where my ds is right now, I'd take almost any of those if you handed them to me and use them right away, good stuff. Definitely save to your computer an pdfs on cd so you have those files to work with.