Provide 3 clear strategies to modify your activities to compensate for these challenges. Reference any research available to support these strategies.
Superflex: A Superhero Social Thinking Curriculum Package
This is a program designed for children with Aspergers and high functioning autism to improve on social skills. It is about a superhero Superflex and how he deals with different social situations. The program also helps to understand different people’s emotions. Below is the link for some information on Superflex. This can be a great program to implement in school. I know they have used this program at different districts and the kids love it. It would primarily be taught by a teacher, but we could easily carry it over into our treatment sessions by if a situation of social thinking comes up, you can ask, what would Superflex do or, if working on fine motor skills, you can color in Superflex and talk about social situations.
Matching components and faces of different emotions
A study by Ryan and Charragain (2010) taught children with high functioning autism emotional recognition through a variety of tasks within small groups, the children were taught to match faces with different emotions and sort different components of faces based on the emotions. For example, they not only labeled happy faces, but also, happy eyes and mouths. This study found this technique to be effective in teaching recognition of emotions. We could easily incorporate this into our treatment session if we are working on sorting, categorizing, or body awareness.
Role playing emotion expressions
In the Ryan and Charragian (2010) study, they also had the children practice role-playing different emotion expressions and drawing expressions to improve ability to recognize emotion. These we could easily incorporate in our treatment sessions, if we are working on pencil skills, we could have children draw different expressions, or if we are working on any facial exercises we could incorporate naming emotions of the faces we are making. This intervention was found to improve children’s recognition of emotion.
Conclusion
Overall, I think we have to be aware of the fact that children with ASD do not understand emotion in the same way we do. We have to be aware to not use our expressions to guide behavior and use our expressions as rewards. Also, explaining how you feel to the child, for example, if you are disappointed they did not follow a direction, tell the child how you feel and ask them how they can tell that is how you feel. We can use pictures of different facial expressions that show, happy , sad, and angry faces in treatment , to show how the therapist and/or child is feeling.Reference
Ryan, C. & Charragain, C.N. (2010). Teaching Emotion Recognition Skills to Children with Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 40: 1505-1511.
I never heard of Superflex before. What a great idea! Incorporating a superhero into social stories would make it much more fun! Thanks for the info!
ReplyDeleteJenn,
ReplyDeleteGreat post. It is SO important and yet forgotten skill to not assume the child understands we are so happy when he or she is able to buton that shirt. We really are happy and it is ok to be natural and look excited, but also know that this excitement of face must now be translated to child using his/her language, telling them, or giving that sticker or the hi five, whatever is agreed on reinforcer for task completion.
Superflex sounds like a great program. Does anyone have experience with this? It did say that you would need 20 min a day initially for the lessons. That seems like a long time for some children.
ReplyDeleteAudra
Audra,
ReplyDeleteI know they use superflex at my mom's school, or a VERY similiar program. She says the kids love it....but I will have to ask her what age group.
Jenn,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the ideas-and the link to superflex. He sounds fun! The kids I see really do try to please but I have 2 higher functinging students who I see together. I've been trying to incorporate social skills because of what they so innocently say. Today was a great example of why we need to continue to address social skills in this population. When Kenny won the game he blurted out "there must be something wrong with Will's brain for him to lose"! I could see Will's face fall but Kenny had no clue and thought he was being just silly.