Category Archives: Sam’s Tips

Know Your Apps when Working with Children with Autism

Posted on by

There are very different expectations for parents and teachers when using apps on a tablet or smartphone with your learner with autism. Parents have a lot more free range on what they allow their children to engage in. As a parent, there are moments when you will have breakfast cooking, the phone ringing, and a work meeting scheduled in twenty minutes. I completely understand why a parent hands a tablet to their child with autism and lets them watch YouTube.

Luca Sage/Getty Images

But, as a teacher, this is not acceptable, unless the child has been working hard, and YouTube is a strong reinforcer for them that will be used for a minute or two. But a teacher needs to be consistently pushing their learners towards independence and thinking about the function of the tasks they are presenting to their learners.

By the same token, a teacher should not be handing a tablet to a learner and trusting that an app is useful simply because it’s labelled as educational. Teachers don’t give a book to a learner without having read it themselves. Teachers don’t provide materials for a science experiment without having tested it out and fully read all directions. But teachers frequently hand a tablet to a learner without having a full understanding of how to use the tablet or how to use all aspects of the apps. This is a problem if the learner has a question the teacher can’t answer, and it’s a problem if the teacher hasn’t carefully chosen apps that meet the needs of his or her individual learner.

To avoid these problems, it is essential to take the time to fully explore an app that you have chosen. Below are questions you can ask yourself while going through the app to decide if it is appropriate for your particular learner.

Questions to ask when you’re exploring an app:

  • Does the game or activity get more or less difficult based on the user’s performance?
  • If the app is billed as an “interactive story,” in what ways it is interactive?
  • What specific skills does the app practice?
  • Is the user easily able to navigate the app? Is there a back button or clear organization about how to move from screen to screen?
  • Are you able to have more than one user for the app? Some apps only allow one user, which is not useful for a classroom environment.
  • What kind of noises does the app use? Some apps have sounds for incorrect answers that your learner may find highly reinforcing, which is counterproductive to say the least.
  • How long is the playing time for one round? Or how long is the story?
  • If the app is a game, is there a natural end to the game or would you have to stop it mid-game?
  • Does the app keep any data or records about the user’s performance? If so, are you able to easily view this information?

Once I have determined if the app is good as a reinforcer, tool for generalization, or tool for introducing a concept, I make sure that I am fully able to use the app on my own. Then, I’m ready to introduce it to my learner!

Tip of the Week: Increasing Play Between Siblings

Posted on by

Helping learners with autism engage successfully with their siblings is an important goal. The ultimate goal should be for both the sibling and the child with autism to initiate interactions without adult direction.

Children playing a board gameActivities should be reinforcing for both kids in order to increase the likelihood that siblings will independently engage in play without prompts by adults. Try to avoid situations where you are requiring the typically developing sibling to engage in an activity just because it is motivating for the learner with autism.

Don’t expect the sibling to fill the role of “mini-teacher” or “mini-therapist.” While at times the sibling may need to prompt the learner with autism to complete a task or take a turn during a game, when possible be clear that the adult is responsible for guiding the child with autism through activities. The adult can also act as a model for appropriate language and prompting in instances when the sibling is alone with the child with autism. However, your goal is to provide low-pressure play situations for both children. One way to help with this is to introduce activities and games that the learner with autism has mastered so the sibling is less likely to take on the roll as teacher or therapist.

Teach the learner with autism to invite his/her sibling to play. It’s beneficial for both kids if the learner with autism initiates some activities. While introducing games and toys to learners with autism, it’s useful to have highly-motivating games that then become associated with the sibling. This way, when the learner with autism sees the game, he/she automatically thinks of inviting the sibling to play. In ABA terms, the presentation of the game acts as an Sd for inviting the sibling to play.

Allow both kids to have interests that are unshared. It is frequently counterproductive to force play situations. Finding common interests is the key to increasing the likelihood of each child initiating play in the future. If the child with autism is required to participate in un-motivating activities with his/her sibling (or vice versa), the child will begin to associate the sibling with undesirable activities. It is perfectly normal and healthy for both siblings to engage in hobbies, games, and activities that the other is uninterested in.

Tip of the Week: Assess! Assess! Assess!

Posted on by

When beginning with a new student, there are two important things you must do. First, pair with your student, as described here. The second is that you must assess!

Unfortunately, formal assessment is frequently left out, especially when teachers are working in the home with the learner. Assessment should be the cornerstone of any choices made pertaining to the skills a learner is taught.

Reasons to Assess

  • Indicates and prioritizes what should be taught to your student.
  • Helps ensure that you are teaching skills in a developmentally appropriate order.
  • Allows you to measure progress.
  • Clearly indicates to parents and other professionals the reasons why you are teaching specific skills.
  • Ensures that you are teaching your learner at the edge of his/her ability.

Suggestions for Best Practice

  • If you’re uncertain about the best assessment to use with your student, contact a supervisor or BCBA for some advice.
  • Reasess yearly and before creating IEPs to have an accurate and current representation of the learner’s skill level.
  • Compare assessment results with other providers to check for generalization across people.
  • Share assessment results with the child’s parents and suggest opportunities for supporting the child’s learning during family activities and daily living.

Tip of the Week: Sticking to Your Intervention

Posted on by

Recently I received a phone call from Barbara, the mother of a 14-year-old boy who was displaying inappropriate behaviors on the train during his commute to school. We had put an intervention in place that had been successful for two months. But Barbara reported that it wasn’t working as well anymore, and the inappropriate behaviors were increasing in both intensity and frequency.

Barbara was concerned and fearful that her son’s behaviors could put him in danger. As we began discussing each incident in detail, it became clear that Barbara and her son’s other caretakers had unintentionally stopped following the intervention. A strong intervention will have multiple components, so straying from the intervention is quite common for both parents and teachers (including myself). It’s important to try to address it before it happens to help ensure long term success for your learner.

There are two simple strategies you can implement to help everyone stick to your intervention.

    1. Close up of woman writing in plannerWrite it down. Some parents I work with choose to print out the steps for their child’s intervention and place them near their computer or in their wallet so they see it on a regular basis. Having access to a reminder of the steps can be an essential part to ensuring success. For example, one of the steps in Barbara’s son’s intervention was access to his favorite comic books with new comic books available every 7-10 days. Barbara put a recurring reminder in her phone that was scheduled to appear every 7 days. Having the visual reminder helped Barbara and her husband stay on schedule with replacing the comic books in their son’s travel backpack, as well as stay on track with all the steps involved in the intervention.

 

  1. Check in on a scheduled basis. Barbara and I have set up monthly conference calls for the two of us and any other adults that supervise her son on the train. Each call lasts about 30 minutes and focuses specifically on maintaining the intervention, promoting independence, and systematically reducing the supports her son requires. Depending upon the behavior, you may need to check in more or less frequently.

Barbara’s son has now gone eight months without experiencing any increases in the inappropriate behaviors he once displayed. Because Barbara has instituted the two strategies above, we have also been able to systematically reduce the number of prompts and the frequency of reinforcement so that her son is coming closer and closer to independence.

**Name and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the identities of my clients.

NEW! Modified Instructions for Games & Toys, Created by Sam Blanco, BCBA

Posted on by

LetsPlay_WormThere are many great mainstream games available out there but it can sometimes be challenging to know if a particular game’s intended uses are feasible for a learner on the spectrum. With a few simple tips and modifications, many of these games can be altered to provide an excellent learning opportunity through play and most of all, fun.

We’ve worked with Sam to select some of our favorite games and toys. She’s field tested all of these with her students and figured out creative and innovative ways to adapt each game to meet the needs of her learners. Our Modified Instructions present 3-4 alternative ways to play the game, in addition to the regular intended uses suggested by the manufacturer. Sam’s Modified Instructions break down each adapted game by:

  • Age/Skill Level
  • Number of Players
  • Object
  • Skills Required
  • Materials Needed
  • Prep
  • Instructions
  • Considerations

This week, we’re introducing the first set of Modified Instructions for S’Match! Memory Game available as a free download at Different Roads to Learning. Just follow the link and click on “Modified Instructions” to download your free copy.

S’Match! is a favorite around here as it presents an exciting new SPIN on the classic game of Memory. This engaging multi-player game challenges players to find matches by the attributes of color, number or category. The game allows readers and pre-readers to learn and play together as the colorful cards feature both pictures and words. Download our Modified Instructions for Use for S’Match! for free today!

Hints for the Holidays: Christmas

Posted on by

Christmas has its own set of unique stresses that may affect your child and make it difficult to uphold holiday traditions with the whole family. Here are eight tips to help ease the stress for everyone.

Create a visual or textual schedule
A lot of anxiety and confusion can be avoided by creating a schedule of the week or the day of Christmas. The schedule can be created to meet your particular child’s needs and can utilize pictures, texts, or an actual calendar. When possible, have your child participate in creating the schedule, and try to ensure that highly preferred activities come directly after less preferred activities.

Provide choices
This is a huge part of assisting your child in achieving success in any endeavor. As described above, you may use visual, textual, or verbal cues to provide choices. Choices can be between large activities, such as “Do you want to go see Santa or do you want to go shop for this year’s ornament” or can be between smaller activities, such as “Do you want to listen to Christmas music with the family or watch a Christmas movie with the family?”

Make an accessible safe space away from lights, music, or crowds
You may need to do this in the home where you are celebrating the holiday or in public spaces as you prepare for the holiday. It is important that your child have a way to appropriately communicate his/her need for a break and that need is respected.

See if there is a Quiet Santa or Sensitive Santa event available in your area
 In many places there are now days in which visiting Santa has been organized to be more accessible for children with autism and other developmental delays or sensory needs. This is a good option if your child struggles with tolerating long lines, loud noises or music, or flashing lights.

Give a job/task
Leading up to the holidays, try to find tasks that your learner will enjoy such as decorating cookies, stringing the lights on the tree, or putting stamps on the envelopes for this year’s card. Having a meaningful and enjoyable job will improve the holidays for both your child and the rest of the family.

Find Christmas-themed activities your child can enjoy with the whole family

While your family may have many traditions that are important for you, it may not be necessary for your child to participate in all of them. It can be beneficial to create new traditions that are of high-interest for your child, such as a Christmas puzzle, Christmas bingo, or a round of 20 questions with Christmas-related answers. You can include these as part of a schedule, with the highly-preferred activity placed after a less preferred activity.

Pair Christmas activities with things your child enjoys
There are likely activities most people enjoy that your child is unable to tolerate. Try to pair these difficult activities with activities/items that your child does enjoy. For example, if your child is unable to tolerate the sounds and energy level of the whole family unwrapping gifts, you can pair that activity with something highly desirable that is frequently unavailable such as a specific toy or listening to his/her favorite song on headphones. You can ensure greater success if you have a few pairing sessions before the big day. For this example, you might have family members unwrap one box while your child has the preferred item/activity, then have family members unwrap 3 or more boxes while your child has the preferred item/activity.

Acknowledge your child’s successes
Let your child know when they’re participating in activities in appropriate ways. This can be verbal praise, physical reinforcement such as high fives, or access to preferred items.

Finally, remember that while you may need to make modifications, over time you can change those modifications to meet the changing needs of your family and your child. Changing or removing one or more holiday traditions this year does not mean they are gone forever, and reducing the stress of Christmas this year will increase the likelihood of happier Christmases in the future.

Product Review: Tiggly Shapes

Posted on by

First, let me go ahead and admit that I’ve played with Tiggly Shapes even when none of my students were around. This simple set of four geometric shapes that interacts with three free apps is one of my favorite additions to play time.

So many of my students are highly motivated by iPads, but I find them hard to integrate into lessons because it’s easy for the learner to avoid social interaction while the iPad is out. Tiggly Shapes provides opportunities for interaction with both peers and adults because it adds a physical component to the activity.

I tried this app out with two learners with autism, one five-year-old boy and one nine-year-old boy. For the five-year-old, Tiggly Shapes was a useful tool for practicing shape recognition (one of his current IEP goals), then receiving unique and powerful reinforcement when he touched that shape to the screen. Though he doesn’t have strong fine motor skills, the shapes are designed in such a way that he was easily able to grasp them. He especially loved to see the animals appear in the Tiggly Safari app.

The nine-year-old loves to draw on paper and on the iPad, so Tiggly Draw was an automatic hit for him. The shapes allowed me to participate in the drawing with him in a different way that encouraged more social interaction while still being highly reinforcing for him.

Although the Tiggly Shapes were initially designed for toddlers and preschoolers, the Tiggly Draw app can definitely be used for a variety of learners of all ages (and also happens to be the app I was playing with on my own.) It is the only app for this product that is easy to modify to meet your learner’s specific needs.

If you’re a teacher working with young learners or a parent looking for unique and interactive ways to use the iPad, I wouldn’t hesitate to snap up Tiggly Shapes. And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll see more apps to go along with this fantastic new product!

Tip of the Week: Scanning – Best Teaching Practices

Posted on by

Scanning is one of the first skills we teach learners with autism. This skill, (looking at each item presented and using that information to make decisions,) is essential for almost every other skill we teach children in early childhood. Historically, we have taught scanning skills through matching and listener responding activities by lining up 3 pictures or objects, then having the learner choose the correct match out of the three items or point to the item we have named. However, this is not representative of the way scanning skills are used in the natural environment.

Toddler boy reaching for carrots in grocery storeConsider how you use scanning in your own life: searching a row of books on a shelf to find a particular title, trying to find your favorite tomato soup in a supermarket aisle filled with soups, or looking through a box of Legos for one blue square Lego to complete a structure. None of the ways we scan in the natural environment present materials in a field of 3 neatly lined-up items.

There are steps you should take in order to help prepare your learner for scanning in the natural environment. When working on matching items or identifying items, you should quickly reduce prompts (as discussed in this previous post) and increase the difficulty of scanning. There are two ways to do this: (1) increase the number of items in the field and (2) make the array of items messy.

If we take a look at matching, here is a sample of the steps for a matching program you might use to help teach the skill:

  1. Match an object to 1 of 3 objects placed on the table
  2. Match an object to 1 of 5 objects placed on the table
  3. Match an object to 1 of 5 objects placed in a messy array on the table
  4. Match an object to 1 of 8 objects placed in a messy array on the table
  5. Match an object to 1 of 10 objects placed in a messy array on the table
  6. Match an object to 1 of 5 objects with similar but non-matching items in the messy array (example: you’re trying to match a red car, in the array there will be a red car as well as a blue car and a red truck.)
  7. Match an object to 1 of 8 objects with similar but non-matching items in the messy array

As the learner masters each step, he/she is getting closer to what that skill looks like in the natural environment. Lastly, here are a few examples of how children use scanning in the natural environment. These can be used to practice the skill in ways that are motivating to your individual learner:

  • searching for all the pieces to a costume for dress up play
  • finding a specific piece to complete a puzzle or block structure
  • looking for his/her favorite candy or snack at the supermarket
  • finding a specified item in a picture (for example, if I have a learner that loves Elmo, I’ll find many pictues with Elmo shown and have the learner point him out)
  • retrieving shoes from a shelf or closet
  • picking out a nail polish color
  • choosing their favorite tv show from a DVR or computer menu
  • playing “I Spy”
  • finding the right tool from a messy utensil drawer for a cooking activity
  • retreiving his/her favorite train from a bucket of trains

Tip of the Week: Use Your Smartphone as a Photo Journal

Posted on by

Your smartphone just may be an untapped resource in working on skills with your learner. There are several apps out there that allow you to record audio over photos or type text over photos, and many of them are free.

OurTriptoTheZoo
While there are many similar apps out there, I prefer the app Over for adding text to photos because it’s easy to use, offers a variety of fonts, and allows you to move the text to different parts of the pictures ($1.99 in the iTunes store).

 

For adding audio to videos or photos, I love Shuttersong (free in the iTunes store). This video illustrates how easy it is to use.

 

You can use these apps to help your learner with a variety of communication and cognitive skills.

Skills:

  • The apps can be used to help your learner identify people who were engaged in the activity with you. For example, if you take a trip to a petting zoo, you can take photos of the people who went with you. Depending on the level of your learner, this could involve naming the person pictured, discussing what animals were that person’s favorite, or describing things that person did or felt during the trip.
  • Apps can also be used to allow your learner to write or record a statement describing what happened. This can be done in the moment or later for the learner to practice recall.
  • You can print the pictures or save them to a document on your computer or tablet. Your learner can then put them in sequential order and tell you about his/her day.
  • If the learner is working on recall skills with other teachers/adults, you can provide the images to them so they can provide prompts to your learner as needed.

Benefits:

  • Allows you to provide visual prompts for your learner to aid in recalling recent events.
  • If your learners is highly motivated by using the cell phone, this can be a great way to get him/her involved in conversation related to activities you’ve participated in as a family or class.
  • It provides a functional use of the smartphone for your learner.

 

 

 

Hints for the Holidays: 6 Tips for Success on Thanksgiving

Posted on by

Holidays can be challenging for everyone in the family. Your to-do lists get longer, your routines are switched around, and all the little stresses can be especially difficult for your child with autism. Here are a few tips to ease the difficulties related to Thanksgiving.

acrostic2

Finally, remind your child why you are thankful for them and enjoy your holiday!