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Posts Tagged ‘communication’

If you want more language you need to expand your child’s world

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One of the main autism symptoms or characteristics of children with autism is their language delays and slower speech development.

The ability of a child with autism to talk well is not just dependent upon having the motor skills to be able to shape sounds into words and words into sentences. But more importantly the child needs to have thoughts, ideas and feelings that they want to ‘share’ and communicate with others.

The reason that I want to talk to you about this today is because I had a session with a little girl named Sasha on the weekend. She is a delightful little girl who has many of the pre-verbal skills necessary to be able to talk and in fact she has already started to appropriately use some important words in her life e.g. more, go, biscuit… which is a wonderful start.

However it is very obvious that the area of development that is going to get in the way of Sasha’s language and speech development is going to be her ‘limited interests’ in her life. Read more …

One Habit to Avoid for Better Communication

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Welcome again to our new subscribers out there.

I’m slowly but surely answering the emails that many of you have requested some help with…

Today’s topic…

How Avoiding this one little habit will help improve your child’s social and communication skills

Often children with autism can be very passive communicators and may only talk when they are spoken to or when they are very motivated to communicate something.

Sometimes when I’m carrying out assessments, parents tell me that their child is capable of stringing a few words together into a sentence, yet often the child will not utter a single word for the entire session which is very sad! This is because the child does not know how to share their wonderful thoughts with others yet.

One way that you can dramatically improve your child’s ability to actively share their thoughts and ideas with you is by reducing the amount of questions that you ask them. Sounds simple I know. But sometimes we have such a natural desire to constantly ask our child questions because we know that they understand many things and we want to try and ‘squeeze’ as much information out of them as possible!

Here are 3 reasons why you should avoid doing this Read more …

“My child wants to socialise with other kids but doesn’t know how”

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Hi all,

Thanks to those of you that sent me through your questions and comments in response to my last message. It gives me more ideas of the knowledge that you would like me to share with you. As mentioned, unfortunately I won’t be able to answer them all immediately, but over time I will certainly try to answer everyone’s questions.. so stay tuned!

A number of you were interested in knowing more about how to help your child socialise with other children. I may have touched on this topic before, but since most of these issues can be quite complex and in-depth, it can be quite valuable to revisit them from another angle.

So in relation to the topic of Socialisation with Peers it is important that you understand a few key things.

1. Signs that your child is ready to begin Socialising with Peers

A child’s ability to socialise effectively with other children comes very naturally once the child is interacting well with his or her parents/caregivers first. When your child is playing with you they must be showing the following skills: Read more …

7 tips for disciplining children with autism

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Recently some of you have asked for my opinions on the subject of disciplining children with autism.

Just a quick note. If you ever have any questions, comments or opinions to share, you can leave them at the bottom of the post.

This topic is very detailed and I handle this area of development very individually with each of my clients. As you can imagine there are numerous ways of dealing with situations. This depends on the age, severity level and personality of the child, etc.

I think the best way of getting this conversation started is to look at an email I received requesting some advice Read more …

Help! My child finds it hard to concentrate

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Firstly, welcome to our new readers out there!

I thought I would share with you an email that I received from one of my clients. This topic is something that I am dealing with on a day to day basis in my work so I thought that it would be very relevant for many of you.

How many of you would love your child to be able to sit down and concentrate on a game, activity or piece of work for longer than minute or perhaps even a few seconds!???

Then Henry’s mum’s story will probably sound familiar to you…

“Thank you for putting together the Autism Essentials pack it has indeed helped us with our son Henry. We are going ok implementing the sensory diet but Henry is very physical and seeks movement activities all the time. So when we want to do something “low key” (eg: a puzzle) he really lacks interest and the balance between the two is hard to establish”

So what is a Sensory Diet and what can you do in these situations to help your child? Read more …

Full Marks for Fabulous Teachers

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Today I experienced something at a client’s preschool which certainly added an extra spring to my step for the rest of the day

It gives me such a buzz when I attend goal setting meetings at preschools and schools and the teachers truly celebrate the positive contribution that the child, diagnosed with autism, makes to the classroom.

This got me thinking

‘Why are particular schools and preschools SO much better than others, for kids with ASD?’

Here are some of my initial thoughts that became very evident from my meeting today.

Read more …