Child aged 4 years/Male diagnosed with Autism spectrum disorder has been attending IEP sessions since 1 year.
In the initial sessions he was not cooperative. He had inadequate prerequisite learning skills ie poor sitting tolerance, attention, eye contact and inconsistent response to name call. Also he was not following commands and had self stimulatory behaviours.
In the initial sessions; he was totally in move and didn’t cooperate with me. So in order to improve sitting tolerance, I started with pleasant activities (favourite) and that made him sit on the chair for few seconds. For next one-two weeks I continued with the same (favourite) activities and he sat on the chair for the full session. Slowly he enjoyed the session and his Pre requisite learning skills has improved.
My next goal was to improve matching skill. Usually once the Pre requisite learning skills is set, matching will be easier, but from him I couldn’t get a fast response. I tried many methods but no improvements were felt. I cracked my head to get his response, finally I tried with his favourite pictures and surprisingly he started to match those pictures. After achieving matching of pictures, I started to teach colours, for that I took the same pictures and tried to match with the colours. That was a great success he learned to match colours faster.
Next I moved to identification, since matching skill was difficult I thought even identification will be difficult but I was wrong he could identify pictures faster since it was his favourite items. I tried teaching colours by asking him to pick ‘colour of apple and told red’ like this I continued all colours, he grasped all colours with respect to pictures (apple-red, banana-yellow, sky-blue, hair –black etc).Even he learned shapes with respect to objects like hat-triangle, door- rectangle , egg-oval etc. When he learned colours and shapes with respect to pictures/objects I faded clues of pictures.eg: first I asked him to take hat shaped triangle, he picked it correctly, when he learned like this I faded hat shaped and told triangle alone, he could easily pick them.
This way I achieved his matching and identification skills.
NOTE: FORCING THE CHILD TO DO SOMETHING WHICH HE IS NOT INTERESTED WILL NOT WORK, INSTEAD PROVIDE THE CHILD WITH THEIR FAVOURITES AND THEY WILL GIVE YOU THEIR BEST.
Mrs. Nimitha
DSE-ASD