Tips of the Week

Tip one

Singing songs together can be a positive means of engaging a child. Action songs can be a fun way to get children involved with siblings and peers during a play activity. Lullabies and slower songs can be great means to soothing an anxious or distressed child. While your child may be able to sing head, shoulders, knees and toes a hundred times a day every day for weeks if you are anything like me you won’t make it past day two. Having an extensive song bank will preserve your sanity, adding variety to play activity and exposing children to lots more language while maintaining the interest of siblings and peers. ‘Sing up’ is a great online resource designed for and by music teachers. You have access to great online song bank that you and children will have fun searching through. You can also register with the website and receive magazines and CDs in the post. Happy singing!

Tip Two

Fine Motor skills can often be a struggle for children with Autism. Laundry time is a perfect opportunity to practise this skill. When it is time to hang out the clothes cover the top or jumper that your child is wearing with the clothes pegs. Have them unclip a peg from their jumper as you need them, and also to unclip the pegs from the clothes when they are dry. As this task gets easier you can ask them to clip the wet clothes to the line with you holding the item of clothing. A fun way to get them involved in household tasks, targeting a necessary skills and an opportunity for interaction. With time they may be hanging out the clothes independently, one less thing on your to do list, and an achievable task for your son or daughter.

Tip three

Mother Nature provides us with a great resource for working on counting and concepts like one more or one less. An orange always has   10 segments. Today we used snack time as a stress free way of working on 1 : 1 correspondence and the concept one more, with the instruction, take, for example, 2 pieces, now take one more, how many do you now have? The activity involved two satsumas, 10 minutes and lots of chat about numbers.