June is the month of Father's Day, graduation, and many awareness and advocacy events. Download your June calendar and get ready for the month to come.
"Special needs" is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of issues, from medical problems to developmental differences, learning difficulties to food allergies. If your child benefits from accommodations, modifications, sensitivity and understanding, chances are you'll find useful information and support here.
Has the summer, OMG-what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-kid-for-months-of-boring-days panic set in yet? It's not to late to plan a Camp Mom and structure up those weeks off. I've got step-by-step instructions and forms to help you get things going.
Image and text by Terri Mauro
If you have a reluctant reader, summertime often means months of book battles. Maybe you're fighting your way through a school summer reading assignment, or hoping a bookstore or library program will spark interest, or setting a family goal to make reading a routine. Whatever the nature of your reading project, motivation will be key, and I've got some printable bookmarks that will help with that. There are four designs to choose from, and two different ways to use each to count up ten books or chapters and offer a reward. Use them to kick your reading program into gear.
How do you inspire your reluctant reader? Share your tips on the Readers Respond page.
When Alphas was cancelled last season, TV lost what I thought was a great character with autism, Gary Bell, played excellently by Ryan Cartwright. This summer, we're getting a couple of new characters on the spectrum, in shows that are less sci-fi out-there than SyFy's Alphas. On TNT's King & Maxwell, Ryan Hurst is playing a character who, according to the character's bio on the show's site, is "a high-functioning autistic savant who specializes in patterns and numerical sequences." He starts out as a murder suspect but is cleared by the show's titular detectives and becomes part of their team. The show debuted last Monday and has its second episode tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern. (You can view the pilot on the TNT site.) On July 10, FX will debut The Bridge, a show co-starring Diane Kruger as a police officer with Asperger syndrome. You can learn more about the show on its FX site, and read interviews with Kruger in which she discusses the character and the help she gets from a young man with Asperger's on the set at Just Jared, Wmagazine, UPI.com, and WrongPlanet.net. (WrongPlanet also has a forum topic about the Danish series the show is based on.)
Have you seen any characters with special needs on TV recently? Share in the comments, or use the Readers Respond pages to diagnose a TV character with autism or review a show with a disability-related plotline.
Last week, I was too busy recovering from our wild Special Olympics weekend to put together a round-up, so this week you get a two-for-one. Here's your weekend(s) listing of all the new content you may have missed from the past two weeks on About Parenting Special Needs.
New Pages and Reader Responses
Blog Posts
Updated Pages
