Last week I promised to do Part 2 of Why Play is SO Important for Children with Autism. (If you missed Part 1 you can find it here).

But the thing is, we decided to try video blogging, which I’m really excited about! However it took us much longer than expected to get Part 2 ready.

So anyway, I’m sorry it’s late, but here it is as promised…

Part 2 in shiny new video format!

The first video below looks at the importance of stage 3 of play development – Imaginary Play, while the second video gives you some great tips on how to use Imaginary Play to help your child (or those children that you treat).

Stage 3 – What is Imaginary Play? (18 min)

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One thing that you need to understand is how important PLAY is for the thinking, language, emotional, problem solving and creative skills development of children with autism. So many people underestimate the importance of PLAY.

Ok. So how does play develop and what should your child be able to do in play?

Stage 1

From birth to 18 months of life, much of your child’s play will revolve around Sensory Play.

This means feeling different textures, learning about how their body feels when it is moved in different ways, listening to interesting noises like birds tweeting, the clock ticking and how different people’s voices sound different and can make interesting noises etc, etc. Their sensory play will continue to develop and become more complex during the first 18 months.  …read more

Hi all,

Last week I attended the Asia Pacific Autism Conference and one of the big take-home messages (which I am always going on about) was “how important it is to fit the therapy to the child rather than the child to the therapy”. This is incredibly important and also a great way of distinguishing good quality therapy from more generic approaches that may not be effective, or sustainable.

As you may know, I strongly believe that every child’s intervention plan needs to take into consideration the unique and individual differences of the child with autism. But what is equally important and often overlooked, is that the intervention must also take into consideration the values, circumstances, and lifestyle of the FAMILY for it to be most effective and sustainable.  …read more

One of the main autism symptoms or characteristics of children with autism is their language delays and slower speech development.

The ability of a child with autism to talk well is not just dependent upon having the motor skills to be able to shape sounds into words and words into sentences. But more importantly the child needs to have thoughts, ideas and feelings that they want to ’share’ and communicate with others.

The reason that I want to talk to you about this today is because I had a session with a little girl named Sasha on the weekend. She is a delightful little girl who has many of the pre-verbal skills necessary to be able to talk and in fact she has already started to appropriately use some important words in her life e.g. more, go, biscuit… which is a wonderful start.

However it is very obvious that the area of development that is going to get in the way of Sasha’s language and speech development is going to be her ‘limited interests’ in her life.  …read more

Often organisations and professionals that work with your child with autism may pride themselves on the fact that they work collaboratively and holistically with the other service providers in your child’s team.

Though I must admit that this statement confuses me a little and I will tell you why…

I think that when most professionals say this they mean that they ‘discuss’ their therapy goals with the other professionals or therapists who are working with your child.

This might sound ideal but unless all the team members are actually implementing the treatment goals in the SAME way, the child’s program will not be consistent and can often be very confusing for the child.

What you need to keep consistent in your child’s program is the ‘therapy style’ or the way that you and your therapists interact with your child when you are working on these goals.  …read more

Howdy all,

This week’s tip as the subject says is a quickie, but a goodie

Have you ever noticed that after your child has been jumping on the trampoline, swimming, swinging, playing chasings or basically just moving around that they are a lot more talkative and chatty, or if your child is not talking yet that they are playing around with their vocalisations more?

Well there is a reason for this…

Movement stimulates the language areas of the brain.  …read more

Often when I chat to families about using visuals with their child they think about photos and visual scheduling to explain what is happening in their child’s day. Also families tend to think that visuals are a tool to help ‘low functioning’ children with autism.

However this is not true…

Let me explain why.

There are three primary learning styles;
Auditory, Visual and Kinesthetic (learning through ‘doing’).
Most people have one learning style that is more dominant than the others and prefer to use this when learning new things.

To illustrate this, the following image shows a very simple version of the differences between Auditory and Visual learning.  …read more

Hey all,

Welcome again to our new readers out there!

Apologies that I wasn’t able to send out my regular weekly tip last week. I was fortunate to have a few days off with my family which was a very nice break.

This week I thought I would share with you a new and slightly ‘nutty’ therapy idea that I only trialed for the very first time this week. Because each of the children I treat are so unique, I’m constantly testing and trialing new therapy strategies to find out what works and what doesn’t in order to get the breakthroughs and results that families are desperate to see.

So I really wanted to share this one with you because it worked wonders for this client of mine, Sam.

It still blows me away how incredible it is that such a small change in therapy can make such a huge difference.

 …read more

Since you are reading this I’m guessing that the subject line may have grabbed your attention which is great because….

What I have to tell you today is very important. In fact it may change the way you think about just about every aspect of your child’s treatment.

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I often get asked to give families strategies to help deal with specific behaviours such as ‘toilet training’ or ‘picky eating’ or ‘poor sleeping patterns’.

It would certainly make my job MUCH easier if I could tell each one of you that ONE particular strategy would be the ‘Magic Formula‘ for solving each of these issues.

But the truth is…

because every child with autism (like any child) is so incredibly different and so unique, there simply isn’t a ‘magic formula’ or one strategy in particular to remedy these individual behaviours.

But there is a solution… so please read on.  …read more

I was reading back over the questions that you posted me and there was a common theme emerging…

“What is the best way to deal with  my child when they are feeling upset, frustrated, annoyed, disappointed?”

I am pleased that this topic was raised because it is an area of treatment that I get quite passionate about and I would like to share my thoughts with you…

So often we are happy to engage with children (not just special needs kids!) when they are happy and joyous, but we tend to disconnect with them when they are experiencing more challenging emotions.

But why do we do this?

Feelings of frustration, sadness annoyance etc are all basic (and completely normal) human emotions that we all encounter on a regular basis. But when this happens to our own child we are naturally driven to find a way of making them feel ‘happy’ again by saying things like “Stop crying”, “You’re okay”, “Where’s your happy face?”, “It’s ok, how about we have something to eat”.

But all this actually does is disconnects us from what they are really experiencing and feeling, and we miss an important opportunity to ‘connect’ with our child and to help them learn and grow from the experience.  …read more