Flowery's girl

I often meet mothers and fathers of newly diagnosed children with autism and once the initial shock and sometimes relief, sometimes devastation has worn off a little, most parents are asking "What do I do now?" When a psychologist concludes that a child is on the autistic spectrum, they normally write a list of recommendations for on-going treatment and services on the child's psychology report (I would love to meet a child in Ireland who actually receives anything from the HSE even close to what is recommended but I will try not to digress into what is another sensitive topic today) but what they don't tell you (or certainly didn't tell me or the majority of parents that I meet) is what benefits or entitlements that are available for you to claim and so this blog today is to hopefully provide that information to all of the autism Mums and Dad out there in our Emerald isle. This is a long blog and so I have highlighted in red the benefits that I am talking about

I replied to a post last night on Facebook from a lady looking to teach her son with autism how to read and seeing as I managed to teach my darling girl Charlotte to read and she is only five and a half, I thought that my method might be worth sharing and so here is my response (cleaned up a lot since I wrote it last night) to her. My daughter is five and a half and reads at the level of a nine year old. It was very difficult at the beginning but she suddenly got there last Christmas and is now reading fluently and beautifully. When I began teaching Charlotte to read just after she turned four I originally started to try and teach her to read phonetically. This means learning to read words as they are spelt. We firstly learnt what every letter says (Two things that were a great help were firstly the alphablocks on the cbeebies website. They are fun and entertaining and she could watch them for hours and the second thing was an alphabet song from the 'Busy Beavers' that we w