It has been so hard to not have Stephen typing all his thoughts and what he is thinking/feeling. I've been thinking a lot and every couple of weeks we would try to encourage him to type "eat" or "treat" or something, and just hadn't seen any progress. Last week he was able to type "treat" with a lot of prompting from me, "Touch the T"--and deleting the wrong letter, "close, touch the T" The next day he wouldn't even try.
This morning I came upon this entry from a boy who types to communicate: it really gave me some hope.
Typing is not my idea of fun. No one
believes that controlling my hand to do what I want can be so much work.
Getting my fingers to choose the right letters is very hard. So much
concentration is going into keeping myself really from making mistake
after mistake. In the beginning it was much more difficult but because I
have practiced so much it is getting easier. So now I can type on my
own. Lots of time I still don't want to type but my mom knows that I can
get better at typing so she keeps pushing me not to give up. One day I
believe that typing will be as easy as riding my bike. I remember when
my legs and feet could not move the pedals on my bike. Now I can do it
easily.
Oliver
Understanding how much work it actually is for Stephen to control his body to actually type a word helps me be more patient working with him, it has also helped me to find ways to encourage him, reminding him of the things that use to be so hard for him, (like getting dressed, feeding himself, loading the dishwasher, buttoning his shirt, putting on his socks and shoes, playing games on the Ipad ect.) he can do all these things without really thinking now! Eventually typing will be the same way for him.
So today I would ask him a question after reading from a book, a simple one word question and then let him try to answer it himself, if he wasn't able to after 3 tries I would help him by telling him the letter to type---I found that if I pointed to the left or right of the keyboard he was able to find the right letter quicker---still with a lot of difficulty.
I was able to stay encouraging and let him know that I was proud of him even though it was so hard.
It was also easy to tell when he had "given up" and just started pushing randomly until he accidentally got the right letter. (He only did that on one word). We just took a break and came back to the same word.
I think E is almost an automatic letter already, he rarely misses the letter E and doesn't need me to point to what side of the keyboard it is on!!!
There is hope, and I'm pretty excited about that!
***I think this blog is turning into more about me and my progress rather than Stephen's!
