Hi, Mark!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

MH>  Actually, he would use sit in an open indian style and
MH>  use his legs to skoot. It was a combination of a hop and
MH>  skoot using legs (sideways on the ground) and hopping on
MH>  his butt.


           Nora still enjoys sitting cross-legged... in her own inimitable
way, of course!  Years ago it drove her physios crazy because they were
afraid she'd dislocate her hip.  She hasn't yet.  I'm also told it is a
very stable position which helps enable kids to avoid toppling over &
maintain good posture....  :-)



MH>  I had read that the crease tends to be a straight line on
MH>  kids with DS, but that isn't always the case.  There are
MH>  cases of people without DS that have the same straight line
MH>  crease, but they are rare.


           Yes, there's an example of a characteristic associated with DS
which also occurs... perhaps less often... among the general population. 
Another has to do with the "epicanthic fold" at the corner of the
eye adjacent to the nose. For Orientals this is normal... for Caucasians
it's normal in babies & in about 10% of other folks who do not have DS.
 Before chromosome tests were available, Dr. Langdon Down identified
numerous characteristics which are still used today in making a tentative
diagnosis.  I've seen enough real-life examples to hazard a guess in many
cases.  It's important to realize, however, that what's unusual is a
collection of features which might otherwise be relatively rare & that
not everybody with DS has exactly the same features.  The dummified
explanations of DS don't acknowledge that there's more than one variety
either.  By comparison, if I see an article about leukemia in which the
author says there are two kinds I may not learn much from him or her
because I can think of five at least.  ;-)



MH>  Getting the proper movement in the tounge seems to be the
MH>  trick with our son. When I work on words with him, I say
MH>  them slow and in sections.  Making a sound and then turning
MH>  it into a word.  Like "TTTTTTTTTTTTTRRRRRRRRR  uck".


           As a former Learning Assistance teacher, I approve! 
Exaggeration is a great teaching tool, IMHO, along with doing these things
in slow motion.  :-)



MH>  Once he masters a word, he likes saying it over and over.


           IOW, he seems to have a good handle on his own learning style. 
Nora was... and still is... like that too.  When she first discovered the
concept of parallel lines she drew grass in every one of the eight colours
in her felt pen box a day at a time, and then she went on to experimenting
with something else. Right now she's studying Alexander the Great with help
from Yours Truly because she understands far more than she can read by
herself & she's quite peeved that history was neglected in her Life
Skills class.  I'm enjoying the experience of reading this stuff with her
because I did the same at more or less the same age (despite my own
inadequacy WRT politics or memorizing names & dates of battles) &
because I came under fire from a certain high school librarian who
criticized me for reading the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid one after
the other.  Her stance was that my choice of material lacked variety.  My
stance... if kids had been allowed to express personal opinions in those
days... would have been that I'd go on to reading other things when I'd
finished with that particular topic. One historian says Alexander used the
same stallion until the day he died while another says he retired the same
horse a few years earlier.  If Nora & I hadn't read different accounts
we probably wouldn't know that.  I like her style.  :-)



MH>  He will say truck and bus all the time when he sees one
MH>  while we are driving around.


           Ah... I gather he's interested in wheeled objects which enable
folks to get from Point A to Point B.  When Nora was about the same your
son is now & we were on our way to the local shopping area with her in
the stroller (because she couldn't walk that far yet) she pointed out &
correctly named a bus, a car, and a bicycle.  I was thinking to myself
"Wow, she's categorizing!"  I once had a student in grade five
who couldn't do that.  Further on, at a street where we had to wait for
traffic lights, she pointed out & correctly named a wheelchair. The
occupant of the wheelchair gave me a disapproving look... I reckon her mind
was stuck in the 1950's, when kids were taught it's rude to notice such
things. By then Nora & I had spent so much time in hospital that to us
a wheelchair was just one of many similar conveyances.  If the woman had
said anything to me I'd have pointed out that we were using a stroller for
the very same reason she was using a wheelchair.  IMHO this scenario
epitomizes the inadequacy of "political correctness".  I tend to
forget about the chair when I focus on the human being sitting in it, and
we've found younger wheelchair users invariably co-operative when we remark
"I see you're using a Snazzy 350.  How's the turning circle...?"




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+