My 4 year old son has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. He is on the mild end - PDDNOS - and in many ways is coming along really well. He is very social, can read quite a bit but fine motor skills are below his age level and he can't ride a bike. His speech would be slightly below his age level. He does, however, seem to have an uncanny skill with memory when it is related to numbers. When he was 19 months old he counted to 10 (and not longer after to 12 in Spanish - watched Dora!!). He now counts to 100. When he was 2 he had around 35 Dora DVDs each of which contained 3 episodes - and they all had corresponding colours. He was able to say to me that he wanted to watch number 27, the pirate one, purple - and he was always right. He does a similar thing now with numbered Ice Age stickers. He seems to have an incredible memory to do with things associated with numbers. However....in other things, he may meet a new little friend and I have to tell him their name about 15 times! I'm not sure whether this is more of a savant syndrome type ability of whether this is giftedness. Either way, I'd like to know if there is a way we can nurture this skill. Does anyone have any ideas?
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