Cartoons and Kids

As a special event in my Emotional/Behavioral Disabilities class today, my professor brought in three students with special needs, and I had rather kickass moments involving both children.

First was a fourteen year old kid with what at first glance seemed to be Down's Syndrome. He had a really hard time stringing words together to make a thought, but was talking about recent movies he had seen on television. I'll save the details, but we became fast friends by discussing rather in-depth plot details of the Nickelodeon show iCarly.

Next was a four year old child with Autism who, as most of those children do, scripts movies. Scripting is when you can recite, at will, lines and scenes from movies or television shows. He was going on and on about a mouse getting stuck inside of a saxophone and nobody could figure out what that was from. Then, it hit me. Thank God I have had my seven year old sister to watch kids shows with, because from doing stuff with her I realized that he was scripting the Wonder Pets. Needless to say, it resulted in fantastic looks of amazement from the child, and odd looks of "how do you know that exactly?" from the class. FANTASTIC!