I share success stories of experiences where visual resources have had a big impact on autistic children’s understanding and this has helped with their communication, independence and learning. With practical examples.
How successful parent and teacher relationships impact children with autism and how to ensure the relationship is effective, from a parent and teacher perspective. Parent Perspective Written by Harshita Patel, parent and author of ‘Autism in the City’ It’s Good to Talk! The moment a child with special Read more…
I recently wrote an article for Widgit, all about ‘Using symbols to support ASD Teaching‘. Widgit is a symbol set containing more than 17,000 symbols. Widgit symbols are clear, simple, colourful and display a single concept in a concise way, aimed to be understood by all abilities. Read more…
Emotional regulation is a key area of development. Being able to regulate emotions means being able to effectively identify and respond to an emotional experience. For children with autism, understanding their emotion and knowing how to appropriately respond to help themselves regulate, can be very challenging. This therefore needs to be Read more…
Each child with a diagnosis of autism will have varying abilities with language and communication. If you know more than one child with autism, you will know that their communication and language abilities and features will be very different. It is important to understand the difference between expressive and Read more…
Like any abstract theme, the concept of ‘like’ and ‘don’t like’ can sometimes be challenging for children with autism to understand. Therefore, it is important to ensure a child really understands what it means to ‘like’ something. A successful strategy is to model the language at the exact time the child Read more…
From left to right: Myself – Steph Reed, Jarymke Malijaars (Ku Leuven), Pat Quigley (The Garden Head of School) and Beth Junor (Specialist ASD Speech and Language Therapist). I was very grateful to attend the ComFor training held at The Garden School in January. The ComFor assessment is a tool Read more…
Imagine a typical classroom, what can you see and hear? It may be very noisy, have lots of furniture and equipment crammed into small spaces, perhaps a bit of clutter and bright and colourful displays on every available wall space! This can often be very overwhelming and distracting for Read more…
I really love and appreciate the Intensive Interaction approach to learning early communication. I have had many positive and rewarding interactions with my pupils through the approach. “Intensive Interaction is an approach to teaching the pre-speech fundamentals of communication to children and adults who have severe learning difficulties and/or Read more…
Many children with autism are visual learners. Showing a child a picture can be much more meaningful than telling a child what to do. Pictures can aid a child’s learning and support them to be independent. An example of using pictures or symbols to aid learning and independence: dressing and Read more…