From 2001-2004, I was approved by the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) to be on the TCA Artist in Educaton roster. Rick Hernandez was the Director at TCA at the time.
Celia Hughes was the person in charge of Art Spark. Art Spark was given a grant by the Texas Commission on the Arts to fund a program which would bring artists to elementary schools to do workshops with the parents of pre-school Spanish-speaking children . While the grant money lasted, artists were trained to do presentations to motivate the moms to start preparing their children to start reading and speaking in English, through art.
Because I am bilingual and an artist, I was invited to be trained as a presenter for these workshops. The workshops were conducted at the local elemntary schools close the families. The technique was simple and effective. We knew that the child was exposed to a lot of advertising signs as mom went about her daily business. For example, she might pass a McDonald’s sign or an H.E.B. sign, a Bagel sign , etc. The job of the artist was to train and encourage the moms to direct the child’s attention to all these signs as opportunities to teach reading. This could be done artistically via crayons, paint, chalk, etc. by focusing attention on the signs and start making the connections between letters, words and visual images. This could be done in a variety of ways including cutting pictures out of magazine and pasting them into makeshift booklets with a simple narrative to begin to introduce the concept of reading and what better person than your mom to do this.
Fifteen years later , I had the opportunity to interact with Jagger, a nonverbal child on the autistic spectrum. jagger was 8 years old when I got involved and he really liked cinnamon bagels., He liked music. He liked to dance and to watch videos. His strengths were his athletic ability. He loved any kind of exercise like swimming, biking, and going to the playground. He had the ability to easily memorize songs and prayers. He had a natural proclivity to electronic devices like an iPad.
Jagger has behavioral therapists who work with him on a frequent basis and Jagger has made great strides verbally, But Jagger needed help in reading.
I started to make videos which I hoped would get his attention and begin to help him recognize letters and words; i.e. READ.
I mentioned that Jagger liked bagels. In the video posted in this blog you can see a sample of one of my early attempts. I recently saw Jagger and asked him if he could spell “bagel” for me and he said “B- A-G_E_L”. That was a real plus for me.
I am not an expert in Autism. I have no training as a teacher, much less a special ed teacher, but I thought I would share this as an anecdotal experience.
I want to give the therapist a lot of credit for helping Jagger . The work they are doing is making a difference.
Autism is a complicated impairment. Thirty years ago, it was not even known, but they are making progress in helping children with this condition.