Teaching Jeremiah, A Journey into the Mind of an Asperger's Child

Jan. 25, 2008

Planet Heroes

Don't you just love those toys that are not just space-occupiers, but educational too? I do! And now there's Planet Heroes. Jeremiah got a few of these action figure heroes for Christmas and has now made it his personal goal to own them all, their arch enemies, and their spaceship, of course.

Planet Heroes are heroes that use their different "properties" to fight the enemy, the Black Hole (yes, that's really his name and he is quite evil looking too). And let's not forget his comet and asteroid sidekicks! For example, Neptune uses water because there is water on his planet. The commander of these heroes is none other than the sun himself. Each hero is the color of the planets they represent and each has a number on his outfit to signify their planet's distance from the sun.

Where am I going with this? Well, I have come to learn that for Jeremiah to enjoy and really get something out of his "school", I need to center it around those things he loves and often times obsesses over. So I created a two-week long unit study focusing around the Planet Heroes.

For two days we would study one planet. We would add that planet to a lap book we were making, a mobile, and a Great Big Book of Planets that I made for Jeremiah. He would color a box to show the planet's color, trace the planet's name and number from the sun, learn the letter the planet started with, and then learn one fact about that planet. I would try when I could to put rhyme to the facts, like Mercury's number one and it's closest to the sun or Earth is number three and it's home to me. For Venus I walked around the house all day shielding my eyes and asking Jeremiah why I needed my sunglasses on. He would tell me, "Because Venus is so bright!" For Mars we made a homemade volcano to erupt because Mars has the largest volcano in the universe on it. As you can plainly see, I learned as much about our solar system as Jeremiah did! Jerry also made a space collage to hang on the wall, complete with a tinfoil rocket picturing him as the pilot soaring through outer space.

I taped a ten-foot long piece of bulletin board paper behind the couch. Jeremiah sprayed it with diluted white paint so that it looked like it had "space dust" on it. With each planet, we would add our Planet Hero, the planet's letter and number, and a picture of the planet itself to "outer space". We have quite a mural! It was cool to see how excited Jerry was each day when daddy got home to show him the new addition to the wall and tell him what he'd learned about that planet.

We just finished with Pluto today and ended our study with the Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space movie. He got so excited to see the bus land on each of the planets he'd learned about.
If you copy and paste this link into your browser you can check out the Planet Heroes for yourself, and even order their first DVD for free! http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=10&e=planetheroeslanding

Here are some pictures of our projects. Enjoy!

Jeremiah's Great Big Book of Planets

Mercury in the GBB of Planets

Planets Mobile

Planets Lap Book

Inside of Planets Lap Book

Outer Space Collage

Mars & Venus on the Solar System Wall

Uranus & Neptune on the Solar System Wall