My ds has an increasingly hard time learning people's names. He used to
know everyones name but now 7 weeks into the school year he knows
not a single teacher or classmates name (and he has an IEP for that!!
grrrr -different topic). He also gets very confused if a person he doe not
know has a simular haircut or T-shirt to a person he knows.I think that
he does not recognize people's facial features. I am trying to help him
recognize people but am a little unsure what to tell him to focus on :
voice?, haircolor?, special features like moles? context? all of the above or
simple rules?
He also does not understand that most people find it important to know
someones name, so he has little intrinsic motivation to learn them. If he
tell me about someone he will say 'the blue kid' (meaning kid with blue T-
shirt) or 'the teacher from room 304' (his classroom). Any ideas or
simular problems?
It took until my oldest was in 4th grade before he started to really remember the names of his classmates. Every year up until then, his teacher would send home polaroid pictures of each of the kids in his class wearing a nametag. I would then review them with him each night. He still got confused with some of the kids, but at least he knew the names of some of his classmates. He's always been the kind of kid who notices the details of the classroom before he notices the people in it. He has gotten A LOT better with this as he's gotten older. This year in 5th grade it wasn't a concern.
What I find so interresting is the fact that this has been so challenging for my oldest son, who is considered high functioning. My youngest son, who has a significant language delay and requires and aide, picks up on the names of people easily and uses them to interact with people.
Heh, I knew the names of the kids in my classes in elementary and middle school, however it took me half the year to learn them. In high school and collage I never succeeded in learning everyones name becaue everyone moved around too much, and was not really motivated to learn the names.Both my kids have trouble with names. They have two cousins who live nearby, a girl and a boy. My youngest son described his female cousin the other day as "the friend of M who lives at M's house." What in the world????
We had learning names on my oldest son's first grade IEP. I made a book for him as soon as we got the class pictures. The small format was less than ideal, but he saw bigger pictures at school. His teacher made cards with pictures and names, so he could play Concentration or a Bingo-like game with them. He learned them all by January, with the exception of one girl that he didn't interact with much.
I was at an autism seminar yesterday, and the guest speaker mentioned an adult with Aspergers who kept asking questions during college class lectures, bugging the crap out of everybody. They took video of the class situation, so he could analyze his behavior. She said it took 200+ viewings before he was consciously aware that there were other people in the room. I don't really see how this is possible, but I think it's an extreme example of how people on the spectrum can so intensely focused on their own thoughts and on their physical surroundings and sensory environment that many other relevant aspects of the situation become invisible.
I suspect that my oldest son looks at the most obvious features, like hair, clothing style, and skin color, because this is where I see false negatives (for example afraid of his teacher when she had her long hair up in a bun) and false positives (for example look, there's my cousin about a girl who had the same skin color and age).
The question is whether your son isn't paying attention to faces, or if has real face blindness. Here are some good faceblind sites:
http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/ - a faceblind man's site
http://www.prosopagnosia.com/ - an analogy of what it's like, using rocks.
http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php - includes facial memory tests, but I don't know if they're usable for kids. I haven't tried them.
Good luck with everything.
kristys ... great suggestion. My 2 youngest also do not remember names at all.
C had this problem in preschool and a bit last year in kindergarten. We had a picture book made up off all of the teachers and therapists, and all of the kids. It worked really great for us.We had the teacher take pictures of each kid and write the names on the picture and the same for the teachers. He's getting them very quickly with the pictures. Maybe they could do that since it is an IEP goal. I then have our aide prompt him to address the kids by name when he sees them in class. My son is a bit younger, but he loves to carry around the pictures at home and tell us who they are and if they are a boy or girl. It's kind of cute.