Maizie Counts Money!

I have some great news today. Maizie counted quarters at tutoring today. I know this seems like a little thing but truly it is huge. It felt like when she first decoded letters and began reading words after months of working at it. Progress!

Math has been a long, sometimes torturous process for Maizie to learn. At times her tutor and me were wondering if she would ever remember any of it, yet alone "get it". We are still using the Lindamood Bell On Cloud Nine program. Of course we tweak it a lot to Maizie's needs. We are constantly going over and over all of the steps that have led up to this point. If we don't she will forget it easily. The number line, visualizing, greater than and less than, that a number actually symbolises a number of objects and so on. For a while we did a lot of problems written as the words instead of numbers. Like this...four + five = nine. This mainly eased her worry over doing the problem wrong and made her visualize the numbers in a way that worked for her first.

Maizie had just as much anxiety learning to read as she does learning math. Now she can read at a fifth grade level, comprehension is improving but still a struggle. What is truly lovely though is that she loves to read. She reads more than I ever did as a child. I will stop everything to listen to her read. I often wonder if she will be able to do math like she reads. Jeannie seems to think we will only be able to go so far before she won't get it anymore. We both agree that we can't give up. She needs to at least have some skills for daily life. Finally, I feel more hope that this goal will be reached.

It is the visualization that Maizie struggles with. Since starting homeschooling she has improved greatly with this. Once again, I credit this to lower stress, being able to catch up in learning how to play and using the Lindamood Bell Visualization methods. We do lots of work closing our eyes and picturing the numbers in our heads or the sentences from her reading books. Then with the reading she has to answer questions that help her visualize more specifically. I really do see it helping.

Anyway, with money she has always resisted learning it. I think because there was no foundation there for her to build upon. She could not even visualize numbers or what they meant yet alone begin with money. Now, she is slowly getting it. Today counting quarters was more of a memorization step. She almost has pennies, nickels and dimes down so adding in quarters was a huge step. She can't count past amounts of a dollar without confusion but we will get there. I know she does not understand yet that four quarters equals one hundred cents. We are teaching her how to lay out four quarters and count 25, 50, 75, 100 and then match that up with a dollar bill to show that it is the same. It is a long process that will be repeated over and over again.

She can now repeat the counting of quarters on her own which is a start. If I lay out a specific amount of change first she sorts it so it matches. She has a rough time determining the difference between quarters and nickels. Now we point out to separate the "eagles" and not rely on size. Finally, that seems to be working. Then, once all sorted she puts them in order from greatest to least and lastly she counts them. Her tutor Jeannie began slow with just pennies and nickels, then added dimes and today quarters.

For me the most exciting part is that Maizie was doing the work without her voice quivering and turning all whiney like. A sign that her confidence is at an all time low with a task. I gave her a big high five after tutoring and her smile was huge! I am so proud of her. I am also proud of our tutor and need to do something so knows it!

I was telling Joe today that I feel closer than ever to Maizie and I think a lot of it has to do with home schooling. We don't have to compete with her being exhausted from school and stressed from trying hard to fit into an environment that pushed her senses to their limits.

It also helps that she has not had a seizure for a couple weeks. I won't get my hopes up but if life stays calm for a while maybe the seizures will stay away. This will be the first year we won't have to deal with public school holiday chaos. Maizie seemed to soak in that hyper energy and just could not handle it. Maybe this holiday season will be different.

I wanted to let everyone know about an insightful post at Beyond Understanding by Karen. She asked parents of autistic children to answer some questions and then compiled some of the answers. Please check it out.