Supporting Children with Autism
Long days without structured guidance can often be difficult for children with autism. When adults are not able to provide high levels of attention to children with autism, the kids are left to decide how to entertain themselves. The lack of boundaries and structure makes for a very abstract situation and autistic children will often not know how to organize themselves. They may either move through a variety of activities very quickly or stay focused on a self-stimulatory activity for long periods of time. When the children become bored or overstimulated they often do not know how to redirect their activity to something both appropriate and interesting. Providing just a little loose structure can support long days of play by providing the organization the child needs yet allowing for more independent play.
Encouraging your children to make a change of free choice activity, location, and/or materials every 30 minutes will provide the loose structure your children need while allowing you to focus your direct attention on something else or on general supervision of multiple children.
In school while teaching special education, believe it or not, once in a great while there are those days when most of the paraeducators have called out sick and there are no support services such as Speech Group, PE, OT, planned for the day. In these situations, just getting through the day with the students properly supervised for health and safety was the best that the subs (if I had one) and I could do. Except for snack and lunch, we basically had 6 hours of free play. The kids didn’t realize this though, because I made sure to keep us moving around and changing activities and materials on a schedule. A day like this would be scheduled somewhat in the following manner with each activity lasting around 20-30 minutes because that was the longest the students could maintain their interest in the materials.
- Free choice at our desk with desk appropriate materials books, small toys, writing.
- A Teacher led Group activity on the carpet
- Snack
- Recess outside
- Free -choice at the group table with puzzles
- Back to the group carpet area for free dance to music to get the wiggles out
- Back to our desks for playing with different desk appropriate materials, therapy dough, fine motor toys, sensory toys, play dough.
- Lunch
- Recess
- Free choice at the group table with art supplies
- Group on the carpet smart board activities/ Technology supported reading
- Back to our desks for one last free choice with simple table top toys while also packing our bags to go home.
The students had a fun day and were safe but still remained cooperative and engaged. The key points were structuring and changing the materials/toys, areas of play, and physical activity or energy level on a schedule that took into consideration the children’s attention span and satiation point for each activity.
This type of plan can easily be adopted in a home or daycare environment. Keeping the children’s interest engaged is the key. By making changes every 30 minutes or so, you reignite their attention towards a new activity and keep them positively occupied.
