Karaoke as Curriculum: teaching through musical passion

It's December already! ... and what better way to start off this festive month than with a gift of music. I'd like to welcome back my guest blogger Carole (Kevin's mom) who has been using Kevin's love of music to happily teach language and literacy:

Picture drawn by Kevin

And now, here's Carole:

"When you raise a child on the ASD spectrum, a child who doesn’t just pick up skills, and learn naturally like other children, you become painfully aware of how incredible those early years of learning really are. You see other children learn to mimic, speak, understand, read cues, watch and follow. It’s phenomenal how much is learned in such a short space of time, and apparently so effortlessly. For the rest of us, there is an overwhelming void, and we have to decide what to teach, when to teach it, what is the priority, and figure out how so much can be taught without overwhelming our little ones. For my adult son, I still find myself deciding on his behalf, what, when and how to teach. If you’re anything like me, this can be a little overwhelming at times, and the responsibility of deciding for another adult what they need, or should know feels a little like making choices that shouldn’t be mine. I recently wrote to someone, and I shared that my middle aged brain prefers the KISS method, (keep it simple stupid) because frankly that’s about all it can handle. Then it occurred to me, that’s exactly the approach I use when teaching my son.

Teaching an unwilling student is painful at best, so I have always taken the things he loves, and tried to incorporate as much curriculum as I can in them, so that it never feels like work. It also allows me to teach skills that don’t necessarily fit his development at that moment, but hopefully will be there at the ready when the time comes. So for example, my guy has very limited speech, he reads but comprehension is very limited, and his auditory processing has always been a huge issue. So the question becomes, how do you get him to make more utterances, and practice the motor part of speech, and do you put the effort into improving his reading ability when the comprehension is not there? What if miracle of miracles, one day that comprehension kicks in and his reading is lacking, or suddenly he finds his words but has a hard time getting them out there, because he’s never practiced? I still believe that anything is possible for him, and I don’t want to think I didn’t raise the bar in expectation of that. So this is one example of how we took one of Kev’s delights and although he didn’t know it, turned it into curriculum.

Kevin loves music, and always has. As soon as I realized that, I had him listening to every genre of music I could find, and often you would hear me singing conversations to him (never in public!) So when we decided to hire a worker for a couple of mornings a week, how serendipitous was it, to discover she was a singer with the most beautiful voice – and karaoke began. It began slowly, he would cough a lot, unused to using that voice. He could only sing in the key of the song, and so we had to find songs in his register only. He couldn’t read, and vocalize quickly enough to sing along, so we had to start with very slow songs, and he had trouble with the reading.

Video of Kevin doing Karaoke:

Click this link to see video on YouTube (if your browser won't automatically play the inserted video clip)

Today, it’s his favourite activity, and we’re all kitted out with microphones for the computer, and a huge playlist from youtube. He can harmonize, it doesn’t need to be in his register anymore. He reads so much better, but we continue to have the lyrics on screen and the singer in the background, so that he hears when he reads a word incorrectly and learns to correct. He reads quickly, his inflection is great, his speaking voice is slightly less robotic, and although you will hear coughing, it is much reduced. Although he’s never going to be a rock star, the anticipation in his face as he awaits karaoke time speaks volumes, and it also happens to be my favourite time of the day too.

So I urge you, follow their lead, how can it ever be wrong when it brings them so much happiness? Once in a while you may even get some validation for following your intuition!"

Well said Carole! You always get the best learning at the point where passion and fun meet - when you find that sweet spot, everyone has a great time and the skills you teach stick.

~ Sheila B ~

note: for those who are interested in the research, here's a recent reference provided by Carole:

Fronto-Temporal Connectivity is Preserved During Sung but Not Spoken Word Listening, Across the Autism Spectrum.
Sharda M, Midha R, Malik S, Mukerji S, Singh NC.
Autism Res. 2014 Nov 5.

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Drawing Together for Communication: how to get things started

Drawing can be a useful tool for developing communication skills in young children, and in older children (and teens and adults) with communication delays.

One of the techniques I commonly use in therapy is "collaborative drawing", where each person contributes to the larger drawing, and the drawing itself acts as a visual record of the conversation or story. Take a look at this video (made with my typically developing nephew Will when he was 4 years old) for a short demonstration of this technique:

click this link if video does not automatically appear in your browser

 

 

Today I want to share with you some interesting developments from one of my young friends on the autism spectrum. Kieran is a bright active young boy (in grade 4) with delays in the development of his verbal language. He is very visual and is a whiz at math and putting together complicated building toys using diagram instructions. For the past two years, his family and I have been drawing things for him, making visual representations of what happens in our toy play and also of situations and interactions from the larger world around him.

During our early sessions, he was happy to have others do the drawing. The drawing was a good anchor for our conversations during play and this helped his focus, his comprehension and his verbal language development. Following our drawing/play sessions he liked to have the big drawings posted on the walls at home so he could look at them, think about them and talk about them with his family.


Then, at the beginning of this calendar year, Kieran started to take a more active role in the drawing process.


He began to frequently tell me what to draw and how to draw it. For example, this "portrait" of him and his cat was drawn in January according to his very detailed instructions:

portrait of Kieran in cowboy hat & tractor pyjamas (drawn by me, directed verbally by him)

He started drawing spontaneously to express himself - here is a picture, also from January, that he drew when his mom was drawing out some challenges from the school day (his suggestion ... how about going to Monster University?):

"I want to go to Monster University"

He has begun to draw collaboratively, adding details and figures to our large drawings (that we do beside our toy play), so now those drawings include his direct visual thoughts as well as his play ideas and what he has verbally directed me to add.

Here's a drawing from February where we explored the difficulty of loud noises and emotional responses to various situations - at the end of our session, he spontaneously added his two cats:



this "big picture" is done on 2 ft x 3 ft paper beside our toy play area
(this day we were playing with trains & plasticine figures)

Kieran's cat Ginger

Keiran's cat Spooky

 

Then at our last session in April, he added multiple details to our picture about Thomas the Tank Engine and friends:

 

Kieran added tracks and faces and smokestacks and many other details

What are the benefits of going after communication in this context?

 

First and foremost, it's fun and relaxed, and it makes formidably difficult skills (communication and social interaction) more approachable and accessible.

 

Second, it stimulates communication development in a very natural context, so the language learned is already generalized to where it's functional and fits.

 

Third, it lets the individual (who is the target of the therapy) set the pace - you can be certain that the information is going in, and they will show you when they have enough information and confidence to give the new skills a try.

 

 

 

 

Because we have never forced the issue, Kieran continues to willingly taking steps forward, trying new things and gaining confidence daily.

 

I leave you with his latest creation, a plasticine cat modeled after the many little plasticine animals I have made for him during our play over the last year - as you can see, it's a great cat with lots of personality and a happy disposition ... just like the young artist who made it.

 

Kieran's clay creation

 

 

ASD Adults and Life-long Language Learning

One of my strong interests when I went through graduate school for speech pathology was the connection between the brain (neurology) and language learning.

At that time (early 1980's), conventional wisdom in the field of neurolinguistics was that there was a defined window for language acquisition. Scientific studies of people who lost language skills because of acquired brain damage (resulting from something like a head injury or stroke) showed patients had a different capacity for language learning, depending on their age - pre-puberty the brain was plastic and had a good ability to relearn language skills, but post-puberty that learning window seemed to close.

I never really questioned this until several years later when I started working with adolescents and young adults on the autism spectrum. Everyone was post-puberty and many had severely limited verbal language skills, with some completely non-verbal. I found myself mixing my clinical experience with stroke victims (including the use of non-conventional communication means like drawing) into my language development therapy techniques. And I learned an interesting thing: the neuroplasticity necessary for new language learning that was not supposed to exist in this population, did exist. Many of the students desperately wanted to crack the code of conventional communication, and their brains were capable. The limiting factor was more me than them - I could see the potential, but was only beginning to discover the tools that might be effective to bridge that communication gap.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I have more tools in my therapy toolbox - my ASD students have been my teachers, and working with the same individuals over time has taught me some very important things about language learning and ASD:

1. The early years may not be optimal for language learning because neural pathways are developing in a different way at a different pace - if the world is a screaming wall of sound, you can't pick out the words.

2. Written words can help to sort out the string of sounds at the ear, so the person can begin to make sense out of auditory language.

3. Drawing can be a clarifying communication tool that helps therapists/teachers/parents to explain and highlight important information about everyday life, and that can help ASD individuals to explain their perspective and experience of the world.

4. Most importantly, language learning is a life-long process and significant language learning can happen in the adult years, so don't give up trying to reach and teach.

And so for today, an illustration of point #4: 

Adam (age 23) has started writing complex sentences in the past couple of months. We begin with a picture (one of his favourite topics is animals):

Adam then uses Word Mover (iPad app) to write a sentence about what he sees (I love this app because it lets you create sentences like a puzzle). After that, he writes the sentence out and illustrates it with a cartoon drawing:

In this instance, he has spontaneously and purposefully made a lengthy compound sentence (using a clause introduced by a preposition "under ....") to express a complex thought. His picture is a projection of his thoughts about the animals and their feelings - he gives the animals personality and connection (it's not copied, it's "inspired by").

I love to see errors in the sentence construction - they show me that I'm looking at meaningful language learning rather repetition of memorized language "chunks".The spelling error in "hideing" indicates that he's using his own grammatical rules to change verb tenses (add "ing" to the verb for present tense), and the missing word "of" in "family (of) elephants" shows me that he's using a rule he's made about modifying nouns with adjectives (he's used the same structure as "baby elephant").

And that's what gets this speech pathologist excited! Especially when this level of language development was not predictable from his language level in his childhood or early teens. It means that I don't know the ceiling on his learning potential.

.... here's a few more recent sentences and pictures from Adam for your enjoyment:

I'm a big believer in life-long learning. My best advice to parents, educators and therapists would be to let go of any preconceptions about how and when things are usually learned, continually modify your teaching methods to match  the individual's learning profile, and never underestimate the power and plasticity of an intelligent brain ... SB




Note: Recently, someone asked me if there were any neurolinguistic studies connected to the type of therapy I do (using drawing/art to teach communication and language skills). I am not aware of any, but I think it would be an interesting thing to study. If anyone reading this blog knows of related research (or is connected to an academic institution and has an interest in this area), please feel free to contact me via e-mail.