Tad Draws

One of Tad’s really wonderful traits is his ability to imagine.  He can play pretend with ease, which never struck me as strange… until I learned how incredibly difficult and rare it is among autistic children.  You can’t teach imagination – it’s impossible.  And I had never realized until we started this process of ABA therapy what a gift Tad’s imagination truly was.  And yet, he has been honing certain skills.  Specifically, drawing.

Part of ABA therapy is making sure that he has enough “flexibility” to draw other pictures than just sharks.  For a couple of months, his therapist was giving him pictures made solely out of shapes that he could draw easily.  He learned how to draw cats, dogs, dragons, houses, cars… but the real breakthrough came when he learned how to draw jack o’lanterns at Halloween.

From there, he’s just taken off.  He will draw anything that you ask for.  He does tend to erase quite frequently, because he is a perfectionist about what he draws (both an autistic trait and also one he inherited from his mother), but he presented me with this drawing yesterday:

Tad described it to me as “shark jumping to eat the meat.”

I just call it AWESOME.

He still prefers to draw sharks more than anything else.  But that’s okay.  He loves sharks, and I’m not going to try and dissuade him from his passion.  I have learned more than I ever cared to about sharks, thanks to him.  But therapy has given him the ability to do more, draw more, and describe more.

His imagination has no limits.  And who knows where it will lead him.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2011 at 1:17 am and is filed under Autism Adventures, Children.
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