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"Memonade!"
Chloe, 5, Autism
My niece Chloe was
diagnosed at three years of age with mild autism and intellectual
delay. Her speech had started to develop when she was nearing four,
but her communication is largely limited to imitating what we say to
her and copying phrases off her Disney videos.
When she first saw Food for Thought, she hadn't had much experience
with Compic, but she could identify drawings of particular things.
She's right into food too, so she recognised a lot of the pictures.
I sat her on my chair and she began to point to the pictures that
she knew.
I helped her select the food pictures so that she could hear the
words being read back to her and of course she imitated this. The
first word she squealed was "Memonade!!" She was so cute! We went
through quite a few words and made lots of sentences using the
sentence maker activity. She spent a full 15 minutes on it before
she'd had enough.
Later that night, I got a call from her mum (my sister) who told me
that Chloe had just spent the last half hour repeating all the
sentences that she had made using Food for Thought and then making
all the associated eating sounds eg. I like ice-cream, slurp slurp.
So she had not just remembered, but actually understood! When she
got to pizza, her mum said that she didn't hear any noises and
concluded that Chloe didn't know what eating pizza sounded like,
because she eats it piece by piece, very quietly!!!
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