Wisdom Wednesday: Strengths and Abilities of Autistic Children
Wisdom Wednesday: Strengths and Abilities of Autistic Children
In celebration of Autism Awareness month, this Wisdom Wednesday is all about celebrating the strengths and abilities of Autistic children.
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Autistic children are unique.
Like any child, each autistic child will develop skills at different rates.
Focusing on strengths and interests in their own skill sets is a great way to engage autistic children in learning.
The main strengths of autistic children are:
Strong in areas like visual, rule-based and interest-based thinking.
Understanding and working with rules
Making the most of their special interests
Remembering details and patterns
Attention to detail
Visual learning and thinking
They might be good at visual search tasks like finding a triangle within a complex picture or finding a blue S in a set of red Xs and black Ss.
These strong visual skills might be because autistic children tend to focus on details rather than the whole.
Also, autistic children are often visual learners.
Visual information lasts longer and is more tangible than spoken and heard information.
Visual aspects can help autistic children process information and choose how to respond.
How to help your autistic child learn
You can help your child learn by presenting information visually.
You can also use your child’s visual skills to help them in other areas.
For example:
Put visual reminders around your house. If your child can read, these can be written words. If not, use pictures.
Take photos of the different play activities your child can do, and put them on an ‘activity board’ as a reminder or to help your child make a choice.
Take photos of the different steps involved in daily activities, like packing a school bag or brushing your teeth. Stick the sequence on a wall near where your child does each activity.
Use visual prompts for daily activities.
This is a visual prompt I use with 1 of my current autistic students:
This allows our tutoring sessions to go well.
He knows what to expect in each session, what we will be doing and what his reward is when we have completed all 3 tasks.
Autistic children are great at understanding and working with rules
The type of visual above can also be used to strengthen and introduce new skills.
It also helps when clear rules need to be made about what needs to be done when; for example, when you meet someone, say hello when it’s time for bed, clean your teeth etc.
These ‘hidden’ rules then become more visual and structured, which makes it easy for your child to follow.
Guiding children with positive wording will always get the responses we all like to hear. For example, do this …’, or ‘try it this way…’ will work better than negative phrases like ‘Don’t do that…’ or ‘that’s wrong.
Presenting rules in a visual way is a good idea
Include your child in making a ‘rule book’ using pictures and words.
This can be done using an Ipad.
Read the ‘rule book’ to your child and let them look at it anytime and get them to point out which ‘rule’ best fits with what they are trying to say or do.
These types of things are particularly good for non-verbal Autistic children too.
The ‘if’, ‘then’ statement
These statements can help your child understand what’s going on around them, like how other people are feeling.
For example, ‘If Josh is laughing, then he might be happy.
He isn’t laughing at you.’
‘If, then’ statements are also good for activities with clear steps and sequences, so you can use them when you want your child to do something.
For example, ‘If you do these 3 tasks, then we will read a story. I know how much you love stories.’
Or you can use a simpler version – for example, ‘Tasks first, then story’.
Like any of us, when we are interested in something, we will focus intently and want to learn a lot about that thing.
Autistic children can often focus intently and learn a lot about things they’re very interested in.
How to develop children’s skills with autism
The following are some ideas for developing your child’s skills by making the most of their likes:
Developing play and social skills: When your child is playing with their favourite toys or objects, play alongside them. This is the best time for social interaction and developing these skills by commenting on what you’re both doing, swapping toys, taking turns and asking them what they think.
Numeracy skills: use your child’s favourite toys to talk about colours, numbers and size – for example, green toy cars and black toy cars, big trucks and small trucks, and so on.
Daily care skills: build challenging activities by using the things they are interested in to develop their cooperation. For example, if having a bath is challenging, you could give your child some special-interest toys to play with in the bath or stick pictures of your child’s special topic around the bath as a talking point. This takes their focus away from the mindset that having a bath is not fun.
Conversation skills: Talk a lot about their favourite things and what they think. If you’re showing interest in them, then they are likely to reciprocate and are more likely to communicate with you. Using open-ended questions is a great strategy here.
Repetition and Routine
Repetition and routine are an integral part of the life of an Autistic child.
They are very good at learning things by heart.
They quite often will remember large amounts of information that you may have read to them from a book.
They will also remember patterns in numbers or letters.
This is great when teaching them about safety and getting them to remember your address or phone number.
Noting and remembering details and patterns
As Autistic children have a great capacity for remembering things, they also tend to notice tiny details and patterns most of us miss.
This is a great way to nurture creativity and imagination.
For example, draw a squiggle on a piece of paper and get them to talk about what they see, then write a story around that squiggle.
Their strong attention to detail can mean that they can get lost in this detail and miss the big picture of why we do certain things or learn certain things.
In this situation, we need to help them to put the information together.
For example, they might be caught up in the patterns of the bark on a tree across the road and miss the fact that it is a busy road with lots of cars around and, therefore, dangerous to not check the road first.
Understanding that Autistic people are unique, their brains just work differently, and how we can help is a huge step to dispelling the myths and misconceptions.
Zoe
