Autism Learning Potential
September 30, 2008
I’m here to talk to you about autism learning potential and how you can really teach a child that has autistic tendencies. The definition of autism is very simple; a spectrum disorder that makes it difficult to communicate, relate and form relationships. As you’ve probably guessed, communication is the means to teaching a person new things and if you’re unable to properly communicate, than it becomes difficult to learn. It takes a very special care that is completely unique to the sufferer to have any sort of results with teaching and that’s why I’m going to show you some of these methods for teaching to demonstrate the autism learning potential.
Each person with autism is completely unique and this is the precise reason why it is so difficult. When you look at other mental conditions you have very similar tendencies across all of them, but with autistic tendencies it can vary from person to person. It is extremely important that the teaching methods play off the interests and skills of the sufferer, rather than some universal method. If a child is interested in trains, obviously wrapping lessons around trains will work far better.
One of the methods for teaching that really shows the autism learning potential is imitation. The way a regular infant learns is through mimicking the people around them. For an autistic child this doesn’t happen, so it really needs to be taught to them. It works perfectly for relating skills. Since an autistic child doesn’t know how to relate to others, you can set up an imitation of a particular scenario that encompasses the important emotional points of relating. It could be as simple as when someone smiles at them, they smile back.
Since autism is a spectrum disorder, that means sufferers have a hard time responding to multiple stimulations of the senses. It’s sort of like when you’re engaged while watching television and someone says your name. You might not hear it because you’re so visually focused. This is sort of what it is like for an autistic child. This is why it is important to keep your communication focused on one particular sense. If you’re going to talk to them, then just talk to them. If you’re going to draw a picture, just draw the picture. Autism learning potential is derived by the ability of the teacher to keep the child focused and if you’re coming in on too many senses, than something will be lost.
The last part of the education process is to always be progressing forward. The communication skills we have are natural to us and we won’t lose them, but to an autistic child, they have to be always working at it and always growing with it. This is why teaching has to be always progressive and taking things to the next level. The skills learned should be used for the learning process in the future. The last thing you want is the communication skills used to lay dormant; you want them to always be used in future lessons.
To learn many more therapies and techniques check out autism leaning.
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