February puzzles

A little list for the start of the month so I have something to aim for and remind me what's planned. We have decided to home educate Little Bird and although for the moment he is still at pre-school for 3 mornings a week until July, time will go quickly and I need a bit of a plan on how to balance our week with therapies and other learning opportunities. I still expect to have to justify this to various 'authorities' so hence the plan.

I have a stack of autism books to read, currently I'm reading one called The Siege which was written by Clara Claiborne Park. A mother that wrote about her daughter's autism - a daughter Jessica that is now a grown woman and one that produces amazing artwork. As I read the book there are many parallels with Little Bird, something that hasn't happened before. You soon realise with a child with autism that it can be very difficult to find a vaguely 'similar' child and one you can perhaps glean some ideas for therapies from or to help you decide what to do for the best some days. I know all children are different but typical children seem to follow a more set development pattern and autism can confuse you so much.

Anyway, this book has given me some hope. As I read it I'm nodding furiously as to how similar some of the quirks are and the ways Clara approached some of the challenges in the early days have been similar to what I have done already with LB so that makes me feel better.

Source: Artwork by Jessica Park

We are currently working on jigsaws as all of a sudden he is putting the pieces together. He can do very complex jigsaws on an iPad but actual ones he was just walking around with the pieces, perhaps picking all the pieces out with faces on and them and making a collection of them. Now for 2-3 piece puzzles he will put them together in the traditional way. He sat with a box of 6 x 2-piece different coloured dinosaur puzzles and I realised he was picking out the right colours and putting it together. Brilliant! Even better was when I said 'Can you do the yellow dinosaur puzzle' and he straight away fished the yellow pieces out of the box and pieced them together. I continued asking him for all the other colours and he did them all. This is amazing to me. It is like all of a sudden, something clicks and he's away with it. Very proud!