Kiss My Knits!

Emily had trouble in art today filling out a very open-ended worksheet asking her opinions about the Beauty and the Beast ballet she saw a couple of weeks ago on a field trip. By the way, she hated this ballet.

Here’s what came home from the art teacher, and here’s what I’m thinking of sending back. I welcome opinions. By the way, she did GREAT for me tonight on this sheet.
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Emily made the choice today to not do her working during specials. She was supposed to fill out this worksheet about her opinion on the Beauty and the Beast ballet we went to see a couple of weeks ago.

Thank you,
(art teacher).

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Ms. (art teacher),

We appreciate all the work you do with Emily. She can be a challenge, and we know that. She tells us that art is one of her favorite specials, and we always love seeing what she brings home.

When we were talking with Emily about why the worksheet incident happened, her consistent response was, “I didn’t know the answers.” I think this is accurate, but not in the way that most children mean it.

“I didn’t know the answers.” = “I can’t quantify this in measurable, concrete terms.”
“I didn’t know the answers.” = “I don’t understand what the question means.”

Since you’ve been working with her a few years now, I know that you realize that Emily’s brain is very binary. Everything’s black/white, on/off, up/down. If it’s not concrete, she can’t wrap her mind around it without serious effort. It makes open-ended questions like this quite difficult, since she often can’t figure out what the question is even asking.

“What if” and “how do you feel” are as challenging for her as differential calculus would be for most of us. This is an area we’re working hard with her on, and she seems a private speech therapist once a week to try to hone these skills.

Art, of course, is about feeling and expressing, but that’s something that’s going to continue to be a source of anxiety and anguish for Emily. Is there, perhaps, a more concrete way of approaching this with her? Specific instructions will always produce a better result than “do as the spirit moves you” type guidance that might be appropriate for many “typical” students in an art class. And of course, the natural tendency of every adult is to want to move in closer and help more, but once she’s upset, that tends to simply be more stimuli to overwhelm her. I recognize that it’s got to be a tricky road to walk when you’ve got a class full of kids to manage.

I have some materials on working with autistic children that I’d be glad to share, if you’d like. I’m not sure how well they’ll translate to art class, but I’ll leave that to you to decide.

Tonight, asking her to dictate her answers helped, because she didn’t have to focus on pulling the answers out of her head and on the handwriting, she could just think about the ballet.

Please let me know how I can help.

-(me)