Many therapists are now using the creative idea of hands on activities for autistic children as an effective means of teaching. These hands on activities are proving to be very useful to teach children suffering from various Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) a wide range of skills. These skills can range from the daily basic activities to academics.
The Idea Behind Hands On Activities: The most important factor that differentiates autistic children from non-autistics when it comes to classroom teaching is the power to understand traditional teaching methods.
- Autistic children are more adept at visual learning. They find the normal classroom techniques of following the teacher and mimicking very tough and challenging. This is due to the lack of readiness to absorb day to day conversations making it tough for them to understand language and speech.
- Autistic children need a direct approach when it comes to teaching. Sign language is one such hands on activity that many children find easy. Sign language when combined with verbal skills makes it easy for kids to understand the idea behind language easily.
- Hands on activities impart new skills to autistic children through a combination of techniques like verbal stimuli and visual stimuli.
Hands on Activities for Autistic Children: Let us look at a few hands on activities that assist in teaching new skills to autistic children.
- The narration of a story through art activities like drawing or by making paper cut outs of the characters in the story is a very effective approach to teach literacy and comprehension. The art activities should also involve the children in order to make them more fun and happening.
- Motor skills, number and letter recognition can be taught by drawing the numbers and letters with a lot of color and texture. Or stuff like dough and clay for kids can also be very helpful in teaching simple instructions.
- For children above a certain age, projects like cooking can be very useful for teaching math. Measuring ingredients and acting on instruction can be easy to learn through cooking.
- Science projects can be very useful to understand the principles of science and math. Similarly, painting and model building can be used as a means to teach history.
Hands on activities for autistic children not only impart the required knowledge and new skills but also help in increasing the focus of these children, which apparently is major problem while teaching.
