Driving Licenses for Persons With Autism

Storyline Online

Check out Storyline Online (http://www.storylineonline.net/). Storyline Online provides opportunities for parents, children, and educators to listen to and view children’s classic storybooks read aloud by professional actors and actresses 24 hr a day. During the reading, the pages of the books are shown with simple animation added. Each book is selected to appeal to the interest of children in Grades pre-K to 5. The website features 30 read-aloud stories, including memorable titles such as Knots on a Counting Rope, Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge, and Thank You, Mr. Falker. Activity guides developed by a literacy specialist offer a summary of each story, activities to extend the read-aloud experience, and information about the author, illustrator, and the actor who performs the read aloud.

Storyline Online read-aloud books can also be viewed on YouTube. When viewed on YouTube, closed captioning is available. Each year, the Foundation works with publishers to add three or four new books to the collection. Future plans include offering bilingual stories, with an English–Spanish book coming soon.

Promoting Executive Functioning

Executive functions (EFs) in childhood predict important life outcomes. Thus, there is great interest in attempts to improve EFs early in life. Many interventions are led by trained adults, including structured training activities in the lab and less structured activities implemented in schools. Such programs have yielded gains in children’s externally driven executive functioning, where they are instructed on what goal-directed actions to carry out and when. However, it is less clear how children’s experiences relate to their development of self-directed executive functioning, where they must determine on their own what goal-directed actions to carry out and when. Researchers hypothesized that time spent in less structured activities would give children opportunities to practice self-directed executive functioning, and lead to benefits. They collected information from parents about their 6- to 7-year-old children’s daily, annual, and typical schedules, and categorized children’s activities as “structured” or “less structured.” Structured activities included activities such as tutoring, homework, physical lessons (soccer, karate), nonphysical lessons (piano lessons, art classes), and chores. Unstructured activities included free play, child-initiated practice, social outings (swimming, bike riding, parties, visiting family/friends), screen time, and enrichment activities (museum, zoo). Children’s self-directed executive functioning was assessed using a verbal fluency task, in which children generated members of a category and decided on their own when to switch from one subcategory to another. The more time the children spent in less structured activities, the better their self-directed executive functioning as measured by the verbal fluency task. The opposite was true for structured activities, which predicted poorer self-directed executive functioning.—Barker, J. E., Semenov, A. D., Michaelson, L., Provan, L. S., Snyder, H. R., & Munakata, Y. (2014). Less-structured time in children’s daily lives predicts self-directed executive functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 593.

Flying Kitchen app

In earlier issues of Word of Mouth, I discussed the Hideout App (US$2.99) which has been designed to teach young children to read common CVC words. The original Hideout app included activities for nine different CVC patterns—ip, ap, op, en, it, ub, ag, et, ock. A new app, The Flying Kitchen (US$0.99), includes activities for four new CVC patterns (ot, id, um, ash).

Survival and Disability in Premature Infants

A recent study looked at the health of babies born extremely prematurely (below 26 weeks), and those born between 27 and 34 weeks. Premature babies born in recent years are more likely to survive and less likely to have severe disabilities than those born in the mid-1990s. Based on medical questionnaires from 3,599 of the children assessed at around 2 years (an age relating to their due data, rather than their birth date), the results reveal that 6.9% of children born at 24 to 26 weeks had cerebral palsy. The figure decreased to 4.3% for those born at 27 to 31 weeks and to 1% for those born at 32 to 34 weeks. Fewer than 1% of the children, overall, were found to have severe visual impairments or hearing difficulties. The results reveal that since 1997, survival for babies born at 22 to 31 weeks has increased by 6%, whereas survival without sensory or neuromotor disabilities increased by just over 7%. No change was seen for less premature babies, with survival—and survival without severe disabilities—high in both studies. More specifically, the rate of cerebral palsy among toddlers declined by 3.3% both for those born at 24 to 31 and for those born at 32 to 34 weeks. The results from 2,506 children without severe disabilities reveal that just over half of children born at 24 to 26 weeks were found to have scores markedly below average. Those who spent longer in the womb fared better, with just below 41% and just over 36% of children born at 27 to 31 weeks and 32 to 34 weeks, respectively, falling below the threshold. This suggests that while the rates of severe disabilities among premature babies are improving, their risk of developmental delay has not changed. With higher survival of preterm children but little improvement in neurodevelopmental outcomes, there will be, overall, more children with neurodevelopmental problems in the community. Hence, there is a need for more emphasis on follow-up programs on social and communications skills.—Retrieved September 10, 2017 from http://www.newssummedup.com/summary/Survival-of-premature-babies-more-likely-now-than-in-mid-1,990s-study-shows-77wc49