All children are special and have their learning needs, but when it comes to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD, they require some extra effort and guidance to support them and make sure they are easily able to learn new things.
No matter if you are a teacher or a parent, it is very important for you to understand the teaching needs of an autistic child and how you can make things easier for them. This way you will be able to help them to learn better and enhance their skills.
With the growing population of children with autism, it is significant for all the educators and parents to to be aware of what are the needs of such special kids and get more exposure to know the right techniques they need to use to teach an autistic child. Here are some of the useful tips that can be used to teach such children.
Use Visual Help
Whether you are a parent who has decided to provide homeschooling to their autistic children or a teacher, the first thing that you need to try to help out your autistic child to learn better is using the visual aid to help them understand a concept better.
It’s a great tip for parents of autistic kids to teach them about basic things without confusing them. Since it is not very easy for autistic children to read or communicate like normal people, providing them with proper visuals can serve as reminders to them about how things go a certain way and what resources are present for them.
Using proper signs, pictures, and demonstrations can aid them to think and imagine in pictures and make things easier to understand for them.
Be More Predictable
When it comes to teaching children with autism, it is always wiser to have a clearer routine that has a defined structure so that they can feel more comfortable working around without having to feel too much pressure or stress on them.
This means that you would need to make your communication easier and direct as well as be more predictable in scheduling everything to give them minimal deviations and make sure they are not feeling too overwhelmed or puzzled.
You can also try providing different structured activities that can turn out to be quite effective in helping children with ASD to learn better. For example, you can set timers that can tell them how long each activity might take for them to complete.
Encourage Social Interaction
Unlike normal kids, most of the time, children with ASD are either too much or too less sensitive due to which it becomes difficult for them to communicate with other people. Along with their other educational teachings, they also need to be taught how to have social interactions.
They need these skills both in school and at home to interact with other people around them. While an autistic child might not seem very interested in making peers with others or interacting with parents and teachers, it is still quite crucial to teach them social skills.
For this, you can try to make them a part of classrooms that turn out to be the perfect setting to provide them an environment that can turn out to be quite beneficial in helping them to encourage and practice communicating with other children. Before delving deeper into the subject, it’s essential to emphasize that early intervention plays a crucial role in a child’s future when they transition into academic learning. Therefore, understanding how does autism affect learning is pivotal in determining what strategies and support are needed to ensure their educational success.
Enjoyable Coloring
Just like coloring can turn out to be a great therapy for you to relieve stress and tension, it is also quite common with autistic children to be a part of such creative activities like painting or coloring that can help to feel much more comfortable.
By using different colors and coloring techniques, you can help them to feel relaxed even while learning. The reason behind this is that such art activities for children with autism can engage sight and touch that is effective in keeping students more focused on their assignments.
You can also use homemade stamps and a few coloring pages for your autistic children that will help you to keep them calm and distract them from feeling too overwhelmed while communicating and learning new things.
Use Concrete Language
One of the most common things that most people might not have any idea about is that the students may not be able to understand complex figurative language or any kind of abstract concepts as most of the time, they tend to take almost everything literally.
This means that you should try to keep your communication as simple as possible and make things direct instead of making non-verbal cues, such as gestures and facial gestures that can not actually make sense to autistic children at all.
This also includes using the right vocabulary and wordings that can give them a direct message of what you want to say. For this, you can practice keeping your verbal instructions as short as possible so that the autistic children might not feel uncomfortable.
Keep Instructions Simple
At times, even when you are using direct and simple language, children with autism might not be able to properly react or respond in the right manner. For this, you can give them some extra time and effort in order to help them absorb things in a better manner.
You would also need to eliminate any kind of excess pressure on autistic children as they do not behave quite well to changes and disruptions in their everyday routine. For this, you should try to keep your instructions easy and simple.
In addition to that, you can also avoid giving any complicated strings of directions that can be hard ofr any autistic child to follow. If they are struggling to process oral instructions, you can also break down these directions into simple and short wise steps.
Conclusion
So, to sum it all up, it might not be as simple teaching autistic children. However, by making some extra efforts and researching the right techniques, you will be able to teach your child with autism how to learn and adapt to new things.
