Teaching children with autism to label and touch their body parts is one of the most important skills to teach. No matter if a child is very young and has no language or if a child is older and has some language. As both a parent of a son with autism, a registered nurse, and a behavior analyst, I believe that teaching body parts is important for many reasons. For instance, being able to touch and label body parts is the first step for a child to be able to tell someone he is in pain. Over my many years working with hundreds of children with autism, I’ve come up with 3 successful strategies to help you teach this crucial skill.
Back when Lucas was little – before I knew he had autism and he was just getting evaluated by early intervention for speech and language delays – there were some questions about identifying or touching his body parts.
I mistakenly said yes, even though he couldn’t. But when they assessed him and asked him to touch his belly or touch his eyes, Lucas didn’t do it. So I was asked to show how I had him touch his body parts. I said I have to sing the Barney song first to the rhyme “we touch our head and then our toes and then our belly and then our nose.” That’s the only way Lucas knew how to touch his body parts. He was not comprehending touch eyes versus nose or head. He had no idea. And I wasn’t trying to make him look better than he was. I just was clueless about how to even assess body parts. So you might be thinking, well what’s the big deal, Mary?
Now I want to give you a teaching resource on the 3 ways that you can help kids learn body parts. This is for your child or clients who don’t have the ability to touch their body parts, request body parts, or even label body parts.
So the first way is to use a Magna Doodle. And if you don’t have a Magna Doodle, you can simply use a piece of paper in the same manner. With the Magna Doodle or a piece of paper you say circle, and then draw a circle. Then we would want to get them to indicate that they want the eyes drawn. So I might even say eyes and I might have the child touch his eye and draw an eye. You can then do nose, mouth, teeth, ears. And even things they’re wearing like a hat or glasses. We can make glasses especially if the child wears glasses or mommy wears glasses or the therapists.
Some of my kids really liked to draw and they ended up drawing the body parts and talking at the same time. Again, you can use a Magna Doodle or a piece of paper. You can use different color markers or a whiteboard, whatever you have on hand. But I find that that is a great way to pair up some body parts.
The second thing, I think my favorite toy in the world is Mr. Potato Head. It’s a helpful tool because all the parts come off and you can teach the child to label, to request, and to touch their body parts with this great toy! Even if you have a 12-year-old or 14-year-old who is not labeling body parts or touching body parts on command without you showing them.
Some people will say, well, potato head, that’s not aged appropriately. But if they have the language ability of a 2-year-old or 3-year-old, we’re going to have to use toys that we can take apart. So we take all the parts and start labeling them and putting them on Mr. Potato Head for the child. For instance, shoes. I give the shoes to the child and help the child put the shoes on Mr. Potato Head. I hold things up to my face and to my lips.
Really I don’t really care about eye contact. I care about them looking at my face so that they can model my language hopefully. If you have a child that is vocal to some degree, getting echoic control and getting the ability to request body parts is sometimes very, very easy.
Regardless of a child’s age, consider using Mr. Potato Head to teach your child or client with autism to request, label, and touch body parts! To get you started on teaching body parts more effectively I’ve created a free cheat sheet on teaching body parts that you can download and start using right away.
The third way that I teach body parts in addition to the Magna Doodle and Mr. Potato Head is video modeling. I will use songs such as Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. Sometimes it’s just with me on a video. I could also do it in person with the child, have them be touching, just like I got Lucas to do the Barney sing-songy touch your body parts. If we’re doing them out of order with Mr. Potato Head and with a piece of paper or a Magna doodle, we can also do them in a sing-songy fashion with Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.
I had a lot of success with a young learner named Curt who had some pop-out words and most of them were body parts. He would say about 10 words per 2-hour session and a lot of them would be eyes and ears and nose. So I decided to make 2 video models for him. One was me singing Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. Another one was me just labeling body parts. So the camera’s just right on me saying “eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, glasses hi.”
2 weeks later I got back from a vacation. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks. I just walked in and said hi. And Curt said, “hi, eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, glasses hi.” I literally had forgotten about the video that I made that I was hoping mom would get on his iPad. From that session on, instead of getting 10 words in a 2-hour session, I got 100 words in a 2-hour session. So it was a way for Curt and for other kids to just really go up with their language.
Curt is now in elementary school with very little support and he’s conversational. I think body parts are a great way to start teaching kids if they have no language and no ability to touch body parts. Or even if they have body parts but they only say them on their own terms and you want to really strengthen that skill. I would highly recommend you try these out for your child or clients.
