Keeping kids with autism engaged is one of the hardest things to do. Whether you’re enduring a crisis, or even life changes, it’s important to learn how to keep kids busy. Today I’m going to talk about how to make a schedule, how to give choices, and how to keep your kids, whether they’re your children or your clients, engaged for hours a day.
This is a question I answered on a Facebook Live. I am going live every Monday at 1:00 PM Eastern time to answer your questions and present a topic that could help kids with autism or signs of autism.
When keeping kids engaged, people ask how long the kids need to be engaged. Is 20 hours enough, or 40 hours a week? Ideally, kids with autism need to be engaged during most of their waking hours. If you factor in 14 hours a day of truly awake time, that’s 100 hours a week of time when you could potentially be engaging your child.
I’m also making some plans myself. I just purchased ABC mouse, which is an online forum with reading and math and it goes from preschool to kindergarten and first grade skills. Even though Lucas is 23 years old, his language is that of a small child. He usually does some paper shredding at work, so I ordered online a heavy-duty paper shredder. That’s going to help me too because I’m going to be able to have him shred some old papers I’ve had for years.
Create a form with 9 columns. On the left-hand column put the date. The next column is job or task you are having them do. Then put the start time, end time, and total duration of the task in the next three columns. Keep track of the number of prompts needed to continue on task as well as the speed of working in two more columns. We rate that fast, medium or slow. Take note of signs of agitation and affect, which is really, “how happy does he look?” when he’s doing a task. You can rate that high, medium, or low.
We use this form because Lucas can’t tell us exactly what he likes, or tell us which game he prefers over other games. We want Lucas doing meaningful work for him. We want him to be happy. And if he’s not happy, then we’ve got a problem. You can adapt this data sheet and make it your own based on the data you need for your child or client. A simple way is to grab a piece of loose-leaf paper, write down the game, the affect, and whether it’s independent or partner play. If it’s an app, write down if you need to buy it and how much it is. Then once you have all this data, you can stop trying to guess at what your child or client likes. You can offer them choices.
The other big thing, with Lucas and with all kids with autism, is we need to give them choices, like holding up two games and saying, which one do you want to try first? That’s a little preference assessment. You can also put all the games you have into a book to help them see the choices visually. We’ve used choice boards with Lucas as well. If you’re not fully conversational, even though you can speak, sometimes visual support is really helpful when the child or client can’t articulate their needs or wants.
Even though Lucas knows the routine now, he still uses the book. The nice thing about having little books is we can add other activities in. Lucas has a little book for upstairs and the dentist recommended that we start having him floss. We were able to put flossing into his book. I decided that I wanted him to make his bed upon returning from the bathroom instead of after he got dressed. We just switched the order of the pictures. He follows along.
Visual schedules are great for chaining activities together. But, I actually don’t like using visual schedules to teach a task like hand washing. I would actually like to prompt from behind and get kids to do tasks that way. I like to use more physical prompts, gestural, imitation or video modeling to actually teach the task. When we put them together into a whole task is when I like to use these books.
If you have a young child, newly diagnosed or just showing signs of autism, time is precious. We need to make sure your child or client is engaged during their waking hours.
