early childhood educator

Hi everyone, I like to thank all of you for taking the time to answer my questions and providing me with useful advice. I can feel that all your answers and suggestions come from the heart and that is why its especially special. I find the links very useful too. Prior to this I was at a loss as to where to find a PECS website. Thank you once again. Regards Juliana

Hi Zemanski, Call me jaded and Canopus, Thank you for taking the time to reply to me. I really appreciate all the things you have shared with me, the link (thanks Zemanski), your personal experience with your son ( thanks call me jaded ) and your own experiences ( thanks Canopus ). Actually I'm not from across the Atlantic or in UK. I'm from Singapore and its only been in the last 10years or so that we have special preschools for children with special needs, that have the integration or inclusion programmes. Previously, the children would have to attend special needs school and not the mainstream ones. Lately there has been a lot of awareness regarding this matter about including children who are diagnosed with milder forms of autism to attend the mainstream schools and of course, these things take time for teachers to be trained well enough to recognise and handle these children. As the number of preschools offering these programmes are limited, we have quite a lot of children with special needs attending schools such as mine (Catholic Kindergarten), that are not equipped with such programmes as yet. The child I'm referring to has been diagnosed with mild autism. He is able to follow the class and is very adorable, alway giving me hugs and big big smiles. The only disorder he shows is his speech...he is not speaking as yet but he does try very hard to say certain words like, hello, here, bye bye. He enjoys coming to the front of the class during share and tell, unfortunately, I know he tries, but is unable to voice his thoughts. Thanks once again.

Hi, my name is Juliana and I'm doing a course on children with special needs. I have chosen to do an assignment on autism in young children and would appreciate a parent's personal experience about having children with autism. I hope you can help me with the following questions: 1) At what age did you think your child was different and could be having autism? 2) At what age was your child diagnosed with autism? 3) Did you enrol your child in a mainstream kindergarten and if so, was it easy for your child to integrate with the rest of the children? Was the teacher able to offer any help or did she have any concerns regarding your child. 4) I'm also an early childhood educator in a mainstream kindergarten and I have a child with mild autism in my class. While his mum has accepted the fact, his father is still having a problem coping with it. The child is not receiving any special treatment for autism as his parents cannot afford it. Can any parent advise me how I can help cause I feel very much for this child but can't really do much as I'm still learning about autism myself. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.