A Blogger's Insight:
Dealing with Communication Issues
There are ways to work with children who experience communication issues. One way is to provide the student with choices. I loved this video and feel it is extremely informative!
To elaborate on the video a bit, I want to explain my personal experience with Choice cards (which provide desired choices of play or treat when the student achieves the desired task).
I worked with a moderate to severe fifth-grade student with autism for several weeks last year. He was a mostly non-verbal but working with the speech therapist to enchance his communication abilities. He would act like the child in the video from our last blog when he got upset. He would scream, hit, bit on his shirt and much more. To promote desired behaviors in academics and daily living tasks, he was provided with a choice board. For his choice board he had to earn ten pennies, which were velcroed to the back of the choice board for each task he successfully accomplished. Before he would earn any of the pennies, he would have to choose a reward. A visual representation of each reward would also be velcroed to the back of the board.
Let's look at a couple versions of choice cards:The pennies would be given to him in small timed intervals to ensure that we kept his attention. Once he filled up his entire care with the ten pennies, he would earn his chosen reward. If it were computer time, he would get five - eight minutes on the computer. If it were a snack, he would get five minutes to finish his snack before returning to another assignment. The assignments would take anywhere between 5-15 minutes. This method worked WONDERS! Maybe not all the time, but for the majority of the time, we were able to get him involved with academics successfully - which is the GOAL!
As you can see they have to work towards their desired reward in each example, but are provided with a choice of what they would like to earn/work for.
Great video, thank you for sharing. I think we often forget the importance of allowing students to make simple choices throughout the day. Choice cards are something that I used during the summer as a one-on-one support at summer camp. The little girl had a fear of deep water that we were working with her to overcome. We used a combination of first then cards and choice cards to get her to complete tasks in the pool. By allowing her to make choices it made the activity more meaningful and motivating to her knowing that she was working for a reward.
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