Leah turned 4 in May and since then her verbal skills have improved immensely! Most of the improvement in the last 2 months
My son progresses slowly and then has a big gain. He had a big leap in communication a little later than age 6, he was about 71/2. I saw another large leap in progress this September.
HUGE differnce between when she was in school last year compared to this year. She is 5. I would say the biggest improvement has been with the sensory issues. Second biggest improvement is that her social interactions, while still limited, have improved.
[QUOTE=Linda11567]The boys are 4.5 and we've been seeing a bunch of major breakthroughs starting about in June. I hope it keeps coming cause although they've come so far they still have so far to go. I think it depends on the child too. Maybe some come earlier than 5, maybe some after 5. [/QUOTE]
Same age and same month for us too!! Maybe 4.5 is the magic number? Or maybe the "fog" is starting to lift a little, or their body is finally catching up with their brain. I've always thought that ASD children use more of their brain and think faster than we do.
My son just turned six and started a autism based kindergarten this year and he is breaking through majorly. Makes me soo happy to hear him speak.Yep around 6, between late Kindy, and grade one! She has taken off on social interaction in particular!How many of you have experienced a major breakthrough in your kids development during this age especially 5-6. I know many parents have witnessed this, including me. Not all kids have though...what's with that? Is it just anecdotal, or is it a well known developmental stage for our kids?
It took mine until 7 1/2...it was showing some improvements around 5 1/2, but short lived. Drastic improvements recently, thus the 7 1/2. I think it depends on the child - but we saw huge progress between ages 5 and 6 - the year we held ds out from kindergarten. He went to Head Start that year and just did awesome!I would have to say that my kiddo is definitely improving as far as speech and motor skills dramatically from age 4 1/2 until now at 5 1/2. His eye contact has improved, he now knows his colors ... I attribute it to the fact that he started in a pre-school summer program in July with teachers trained to teach children like him, and his therapies increased as well from 2x a week speech to every day. I'm hoping for more dramatic improvements this year as he is in his TEACCH kindergarten class. (praying to get out of pull-ups especially!)
despite Mason's behavioral and emotional problems which seem to be going in the opposite direction, his motor skills, and all around cognitive definitely saw the most growth over the last year! His speech I think I saw the biggest growth between 3 & 4, but that could be that he didn't talk before then and hearing any words seemed so amazing...but even with that he went from no speech to speaking in sentences within that year, and now we seem to be slowing down a bit in that area.
This past summer, my DS had an amazing developmental spurt. He was a little over 6 and it lasted about 2 months. His speech clarity improved drastically, his stuttering degreased drastically, he was able to hold himself together longer before a meltdown and sometimes keep a meltdown from coming all together. He began to ride his bike w/ training wheels (he has never even sat on his bike until then) he would just push it and run beside it. So yes, it seems that many of our children have their devl growth spurts around 5-6 years of age.
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Mark
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