Drawing Faces--New Video Model Clip

Here is a new video model of a great game called Drawing Faces.  I post video clips of games on YouTube for this blog and my website and people must stumble upon them unaware of why I am posting.  From such accidental viewers, I get some uncomplimentary comments.  To say the least.  No video clip of mine has elicited more ridicule than my Drawing Faces video.  (No I am not providing the link to that clip.)  These comments often make me laugh, though I guess they must bother me a little.  Most comments were some version of, This woman is bad at drawing and acting!  So, I have caved to my critics and asked my friend, Kate Horvath, who is an actress, if she would do the game for me  so I could post a new one on YouTube.  Perhaps her acting will serve better than mine.  Regardless, she provided me with a charming video model of this game.





I use this game to teach children to attend more to faces, learn the names of parts of the face, and most often to help a child have a way of thinking about emotions.  Kids tend to love this game often trying to draw faces themselves if I start the game and hand over a marker after drawing the first eye.  I added an OK mouth after trying to use the game to help a child get over being sad. Time to be all done Sad, time for Happy seemed like a little too much to ask.  It was more natural for me to say Time to be all done Sad, time for OK.  I have had some children pull out the markers while crying and want to go through all the faces in a spontaneous attempt to get over being sad.  One little girl would still have tears running down her face but be bravely trying to smile when we got to Happy Mouth.  Anna is not Happy yet, I said, Anna is all done sad, goodbye sad mouth.  Anna is OK now.

HOT!

Capitalizing on Your Child’s Interest

Guest Post by Allison Norgard BS

Graduate Student

Each of us has a favorite thing that we love at almost any time on any given day.  Whether you have a sweet tooth or a special hobby, active involvement in that interest always sparks your attention.  Children with Autism also have specific interests--perhaps an interest in dinosaurs, or the presidents of the United States.  It could even be a favorite color that captures a child’s attention.  You can use a child’s passionate interests to help that child develop joint attention skills.

Even if it feels like your child has a very narrow interest, you can still use that interest in many everyday social routines.  For example, a child in this clinic showed a strong interest in the letter ‘w’.  We discovered this while playing with a simple frog toy that spits out letters. We quickly realized that ‘w’ in all contexts was way more interesting to this child than anything else in the room.

Once we identified the child’s interest, we had to find ways for ‘w’ to pop up in his daily life.  It seemed tricky at first, but once we started with one idea, it became much easier.

Here are some ‘w’ activity ideas:

• Use letter shaped cookie cutters.  The ‘w’ cookie cutter can be used in actual foods such as pancakes for breakfast, or for fun at the table with play-doh.
  
• Use ‘w’ during bath time by cutting one out of colorful foam. 
• Make ‘w’ magnets to put on the refrigerator, the filing cabinets, and other creative places around your home and then go out together to collect them.
• Many children love mirrors; use white board markers or shaving cream to write out ‘w’ on mirrors. 
  
• Take blankets or pillows and make a giant ‘w’ on the floor of the family room.  Than you can tickle and squish with the pillows and add some sensory fun. 

As you can see, ‘W’ can become part of any part of the day.

As you can see, ‘W’ can become part of any part of the day.

Although it might seem small and narrow to focus on an interest like ‘w’, you can use a focus like this to teach virtually anything. If you want to work on a language goal rather than joint attention, you can take the ‘w’ and mix and match it with other concepts to build language.  The “w” can come in different colors, sizes, textures.  The “w” can be hidden in various locations that you can name. You can use one simple interest, at many different levels to help a child with autism no matter what the child’s developmental level.  Following your child’s lead by noticing what interest him or her.  When you share in your child’s excitement and interests, it will become much more motivating and rewarding for him or her to play with you.

Here is a letter game with "w":

Safe Emergencies and Halloween

I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of a Safe Emergency as I find ways to prepare children for Halloween.  Halloween is a Safe Emergency Holiday where many people have decided that it would be fun to pretend to be brave about all the scariest things in life--injury, death, spiders, dark nights, and walking up to knock on the door of houses where strangers live.  As odd as this cultural celebration is, it is not a stretch to understand a holiday like this.  This kind of a holiday exists in many cultures.  Even more common and similar is  the kind of pretend play that you see with seven year old kids on the playground of any elementary school. You be the terrorist and you go in the hills over there. I will be a Pilot and I will bomb you but you try to get away!  Apparently, children are prone to re-enacting whatever terrifying thing they hear about.  By the time we are grownups, our Safe Emergency play has become video games, movies, books, rock climbing, and so on.  There has to be a reason that so many of us choose to spend our free time in activities like this.  I call these activities  Safe Emergencies.

Possible reasons for Safe Emergencies:

1. We need to practice in order to be prepared to handle real emergencies.
2. We like the feeling of control over scary things that we get when we play.
3. We like the feeling of alertness and mental focus that comes when we are a little scared.
4. We learn important emotional regulation, empathy, imagination, language, social interaction, motor and problem solving skills by engaging in Safe Emergencies.
   

Family Monster Game

I think of many games as being Safe Emergency Games--meaning that the game is a little bit scary but still safe.  This quality in a game seems to make it interesting for children but finding the "just right" amount of scariness is important.  Too scary and the child can't tolerate the game.    Halloween is a community wide Safe Emergency Game but it is often too scary for children with ASD.  I have been doing many versions of this Relationship Development Intervention (RDI) game with children this month to help children prepare for Halloween.  Next week, I plan to add monster masks for some children.  Here is one family playing this game together:
 

Why Do Children With Autism Lose Words?

Today, I needed to think about why it is so common for a child with autism to lose vocabulary.  I saw it happen in the course of an hour in one therapy session and during the next session, a mother described her frustration with having her child regress into yelling rather than calling her as he was doing the week before.  The situation was strikingly similar between children which helped me develop a theory.  If you know other theories about why this might occur, please share them in the comments section below but here is my theory.

First, I have seen children and adults with autism lose the motivation or the ability to communicate and perhaps they lose both.  I got called in a few years ago to consult with the staff at a group home where a young woman had not spoken in several years--at least not to the staff.  Her mother was frustrated because her daughter had, at one point, talked quite a bit.  In school and while living at home, she requested food and activities.  She protested using specific words to describe things she did not like or want.  She told her family that she loved them.  But even on weekends when she often went home to be with her family, she rarely spoke anymore.  More recently, I worked with a little boy who had a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome, and in the process of getting this diagnosis, his father concluded that he, too had Asperger Syndrome.  His father was a researcher and as sweet a man as one could imagine.  His wife, who clearly loved her husband, complained that when they were courting, they had often talked together for hours.  Now, she lamented, he rarely came out of his office and often responded to her conversational bids with single word answers. 

Clearly, it is more difficult for individuals on the Autism Spectrum to communicate, even after learning the words, sentences, and situation where communication is expected and useful.  Last week, a little boy was calling his father, saying Dad! and then trying to say Come here!   Over and over we practiced this skill and it appeared to be getting easier and easier.  Today when we started, this little guy was back to yelling angrily to get his dad to come.  Helping him call his dad again required reminding his dad not to come when he yelled, modeling the words we expected him to use again several times and showing him how it all worked again, and getting the timing between dad and son just right so that it all made sense.  It was going well again and then suddenly, it just did not seem worth it to this little boy and he did not want to play the calling game any more.  He seemed to lose motivation and I felt perhaps whe had practiced too long so that it was not really interesting to him any more.  Wow!  We needed to put a lot of pieces into place to create the "just right" situation for this little boy to communicate! 

It is not surprising that in a group home, where staff changes are frequent and no ongoing training about autism occurs, an adult with autism would lose motivation.  The communication partners just don't play their part correctly and it becomes to hard to figure out how to communicate.  It is not surprising that after the excitement of initial courting is over, an adult with Asperger Syndrome would find it hard to engage in recreational conversation.  Communication occurs when there is a perfect alignment of linguistic ability and social motivations--this is true for all of us.   This alignment does not naturally occur very often for individuals with autism--when it does, we are often surprised by an unexpected word, phrase or entire story seemingly popping out from nowhere.  If we want children or adults with autism to keep communicating at their highest ability, we need to work to create motivating social situations.

The Joy of Knowing Children with Autism

One myth that is commonly propagated in the general media is that a diagnosis of autism is the equivalent of losing a child to a fatal disease.  It may feel that way to a parent for a while, but I have yet to meet a parent who would trade their child in for another without autism.  Parents and anyone else who takes the time to get to know a child with autism will tell you that children with autism bring important gifts to families, schools, and communities.  I believe that this is because children with autism both exemplify and inspire human virtues in a unique way.
 
I fall in love with children who have autism in exactly the same way I fall in love with other people--by getting to know a unique, amazing human being and finding a genuine connection. But there is something, some quality that is common in many children who have autism that I find particularly attractive and enjoyable.  I feel like these children nudge me toward becoming a better person by making me look at the world differently and at myself in new ways.  In these children I find inspiration for being a little more courageous, persistent, honest, logical, sincere... the list goes on.

Virtues are gems of the human spirit that are evident in all human beings. It is not that virtues are missing in children who do not have autism .  Not at all.  But human virtues are demonstrated in unexpected ways in children who have autism and this draws my attention. Last week, working with a little boy for the third time, I was getting a little discouraged by how often he was moving away from me.  I was second guessing my choice of activities, my presentation of games, even the room we were playing in. Unexpectedly, this little boy backed into me and laid his head against my arm.  He can't yet tolerate looking at me face-to-face but he wanted me to know that he likes me. In this child I see the beauty of a sincere expression of affection.  

I understand better what it means to have courage when a mother this fall, tells me that her child has been doing amazingly well in Kindergarten despite the fact that he begged to stay home from school every day last year.  This year, he follows every routine and rule in school with such obvious effort that his teachers are delighted.  But when he comes home each day he literally tantrums for twenty minutes before falling asleep exhausted. In the afternoon, he often practices "school" in his pretend play. Then, the next day, he willingly gets on the bus to do it all again.

Here is a video that makes this point of appreciating what autism means from a different perspective: