Someone e-mailed this to me. My son doesn't gesture at all, I can barely get him to point so this got me thinking. Maybe a good IEP goal now that research has been done.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19584066/
Interresting - I'm going to share this article with our school. Thanks for posting it.Thank you. That is awesome. I will teach both my kids that way now.I didn't read the article, but gesturing is vital since it is not only language (communication) but it is SOCIAL. Pointing automatically means the child wants to share something outside himself. The root word of Autism is AUTO, meaning self. That means, at its core, autism is a disorder which causes those affected to see the world only from their point of view and do things only in their own self-interest. In the extreme, it means the individual is not even aware of anything outside himself. Pointing or gesturing or speaking is something that is done only when the individual wants or needs to interact with another human beings and IS aware of persons outside himself and wants to connect with those person in some way. Communicating about desires and needs comes first (pointing to a cookie, for example, or saying "cookie" or "eat" or "want" or "more"). Next is pointing toward something of interest to both the individual and one other human being, as in pointing to an airplane overhead, or saying "look" or "plane." This second form of communication (called "joint interest"), whether the individual is verbal or uses gestures or even technology, is a far higher level of communication and shows that a person who is autistic is not so "auto" anymore, but has included others in his world.Yes, it's a good sign.This is very interesting to me. Ryan has just recently starting pointing and labeling things, other than his desires. For example, he will point to a clock and look at me and say "clock". He is doing this all the time, constantly, whereas for the first 3 years of his lfe he never pointed at all and typically only communicated desires as Tzoya indicated "juice", "hungry". etc.
This got me to thinking about how much of Ryan's communication is "delayed" and what aspects are "disordered". We are still hitting him pretty heavily with speech and ABA, but Im wondering if this is a good sign that hes pointing and labeling everything now (and not just to himself, hes' telling us what hes seeing)? For parents whose kids became verbal and spontaneous in their language, what was your experience with this?
Ryan is still not asking questions other than "where" something is that he cant find...