INTRODUCTION
Welcome to World Autism Awareness Day. This post has two parts, an account with photographs, of Musical Keys yesterday and some autism related links.
MUSICAL KEYS
Musical Keys is one of the events available to members of NAS West Norfolk, and it runs fortnightly on Saturdays. Yesterday was one of those Saturdays, and it seems appropriate to write about it for World Autism Awareness Day. Although most of the focus will be on the event itself, for me it also involves two walks, one in each direction, and my coverage therefore starts with…
GETTING THERE
The weather being pleasant I decided to extend the walk there by starting off along the river front and through Hardings Pits, only joining one of my usual routes at Tennyson Avenue. Here are some photos from this walk…
THE SESSION ITSELF
The sessions nowadays feature musical instruments, computers and i-pads. Also, John from Musical Keys was recording people, which I captured on my camera. I was on one of the computers when not taking photographs. Before the session got underway I told people that I would be taking photographs, why I would be taking them and that the intention was that they should be shared widely. Here then are some photos:
THE WALK BACK
The walk back was uneventful, although I did bag a couple more pictures.
SOME AUTISM RELATED LINKS
I start the sharing process with…
TWO VIDEOS FROM AmericanBadassAdvocates
These two videos from AmericanBadassAdvocates are respectively about Julia the autistic character on Sesame Street and an attack on the ‘blue jigsaw piece’ people.
OTHER LINKS
AmericanBadassAdvocates also put up this piece about London listening and not ‘lighting up blue’ but instead ‘lighting up pink’, pink being one of the colours of the National Autistic Society. To read in full please click the image below.
I am taking the next two links together because they are complementary. Broken Brain – Brilliant Mind with “#REDinstead for Autism acceptance – now, there’s an idea” and thesilentwaveblog with “Don’t ‘light it up blue‘ for me” each provide compelling reasons for avoiding blue and using red instead to raise autism awareness. The two graphics below provide links to each post in the order in which I have mentioned them.
The Art of Autism have produced a post consisting of 18 Temple Grandin quotes. Once again I link by way of an image:
Our Autism Blog has put up a post titled “Meltdown, tantrum or bad behaviour”, which I link to by way of the infographic below:
My last two links, which end the post are on a theme of…
ROLE REVERSAL
Erin Human has produced a post in which she comes up with alternative designation for April of ‘Ableism Awareness Month’. Click on the graphic below to read in full:
I conclude my World Autism Awareness Day post with a link to that most brilliant of all role reversal posts, thesilentwaveblog’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Neurotypicality: a handbook on the rest of the world for Asperger’s / autistic people”. Click the image below to read in full:
