Letter Perfect
Letter Perfect
By Jeff Stimpson
First my 13-year-old son Alex (PDD-NOS) peeled and stuck the gold letters; they came about two hundred to a 99-cent pack, available in the hardware or stationary aisles. Actually, first of course it was the shape-sorter a lifetime ago, which Alex once played like Roy Clark once played a guitar. The shape sorter, they assured us, meant that Alex had a real affinity for letters.
I scrape an O and a D and an N and a 4 and 2 off the wood of our living room floor. they come up hard, bitchy little things alex tossed there after he peeled them off the tv to make way for new words. alex does his composition on the front of the television, on the set’s frame right above the screen. he carefully makes four five, six. why would he stick those up there? we wouldn’t mind except he’s in the way during shows (“alex, move!!”). they come up a millimeter at a time and then they rip. worse is the backing, the sticky black crap that’s left over after he’s peeled off all the letters.
These are half-inch peel-&-stick letters in block Helvetica. He seems to favor the F’s. We get these at Staples for about $5. One of his friends bought him an assortment of multi-designs, too: “This package contains 133 letters, numerals, and punctuation marks,” the wrapper reads. Some 100 of them will wind up stuck to our living room floor.
A long time ago, Alex’s teachers told us not to let him write with markers. “They make a mark no matter how much pressure you use, and we’re trying to teach him to apply pressure,” they said. “Make him use a pencil.” Sound, but one of his friends who seems well-versed in helping people with autism said he had no problem with letters, so we continue to buy them. this friend has also taken Alex on bus rides and outings, and has helped Alex use the black letters to write where he’s been: APPLE STORE FIX I-PAD; RIDING A BUS; TOMORROW WE GO SWIMMING; NEXT WEEK WE WILL RIDE A BIKE. The friend writes these words in pen, and Alex matches (shape-sorts?) the black letters to match the words.
Do these sticky letters help Alex? Forward his understanding of language? No idea, but it’s a cheap treat, and maybe someday he’ll peel off the black Helveticas one by one and tell me what in God’s Name is going on in there.
Jeff Stimpson is a native of Bangor, Maine, and lives in New York with his wife Jill and two sons. He is the author of Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism (both available on Amazon). He maintains a blog about his family at jeffslife.tripod.com/alextheboy, and is a frequent contributor to various sites and publications on special-needs parenting, such asAutism-Asperger’s Digest, Autism Spectrum News, the Lostandtired blog, The Autism Society news blog, and An Anthology of Disability Literature (available on Amazon). He is on LinkedIn under “Jeff Stimpson” and Twitter under “Jeffslife.”
Tags: ABA, ABA Therapy, ABA Training, applied Behavior Analysis, Special Education
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
