Art
During art lessons the children are encouraged to capture their imagination on paper, be it through emotions, past experiences or dreams. Christopher is rapidly improving with copying real-life articles, as can be seen in his new study from the previous month. He also seems to have a fantastic memory (sense of recollection) and is able to portray these with various methods taught to him. However, his drawing style is very logical; Christopher utilises mainly a Bauhaus style shapes such as circles and squares with his drawings. He is fond of using straight lines and calculated curves; often with the use of mathematical drawing equipment such as his ruler, protractor and compass and this can be seen in his alien drawing. He also commonly draws symmetrically as can be seen in his get well car lino. This is a unique and it is aces strolling comics. However, we are attempting to help him appreciate the importance of shading and drawing freehand; this would aid him to achieve a more realistic, 3-D style. Mrs. Peters, 3, 3
Music
This is the fourth year of musical tuition for students. They have now covered music composition, many different styles of music such as blues, jazz, waltz, rock and pop and extended music theory as well as having studied a wide range of instruments including strings, brass, woodwind, percussion and vocals. Christopher excels in many aspects of music and theory, although he finds more complicated instruments difficult to play and has trouble understanding types of music that do not have logical layout. He has a keen sense of rhythm, however he finds percussion instruments such as the drums and piano particularly difficult to play as different rhythms are often required to be played in different areas of the body simultaneously. Therefore he is more comfortable with woodwind and brass instruments in which only one note is played at a time. Because of his strongly mathematical mind he's able to create logical patterns of music, work out correct bar lengths and is able to easily remember a large variety of scales and quickly work out new ones if necessary. Ms. Stevensons, 2+, 2
French
For some reason, Christopher has a strong dislike for the French and France itself to such an extent that it could be called nationalism. He has received multiple detentions for disrespectful and generally unacceptable behaviour during lessons. As for the subject itself, Christopher learns at an exceptional speed due to his photographic memory. However, he finds it difficult to accept that the language cannot always be directly translated into English and therefore the idioms and some aspects of the French language are confusing to him, such as the non-existent past tense which is replaced by the perfect sense. Nonetheless, his main difficulty is simply being strongly hesitant to learn and constantly refusing to answer questions in class or complete exercises even though he is perfectly capable of doing so. He must be weaned from his dislike of the French, or it may eventually lead to more serious occurrences in later life. Madame L’Estricte, 1, 3-
Psychology
Swindon special school is naturally a school with students of certain disabilities. We accept that psychology is a difficult subject for many students including your son Christopher; this is why there is no attainment grade-because psychology is about improving effort to overcome certain intellectual difficulties. As you are aware, Christopher has been diagnosed with medium level autism. This means that certain areas of his brain are severely undeveloped whilst others are highly advanced; in this case Christopher has an extremely logical brain with high IQ and unfortunately a low EQ. He is gifted in maths and as a photographic memory but finds other human beings hard to understand. He also finds it very difficult to control himself when he's angry or confused and has a variety of inexplicable views on particular subjects such as colour and nationality. I am currently helping him understand his emotions so that he can control them more easily. Has tried hard to overcome his various difficulties this year and has made some headway. He often finds it challenging to understand his task and needs verification on what it means. Therefore the speed at which he works needs improvement. Christopher has progressed and much the same level as his fellow students. Mr Jeavons and Siobhan Evans, 3