OK. I'm going to share a bit of this because I think it will help some of you with your kids. It has helped my youngest quite a bit. What I am sharing is currently a work in progress and comes from a recent research study involving autism in young children. They are working on this program for children trying to get a set "order" of lessons or steps set up to improve joint attention in kids w/ autism but the program is still working out all the "kinks" before it is put out publicly for everyone. The reason I know about it and have the information is because I participated in the process with my son. The researchers came to the house weekly for taping and testing and my child improved significantly over 4 months time. I can not give you ALL the information at this time but basically the program is broken down into 3 units; focusing on faces, turn taking and then joint attention. There are several lessons in each unit beginning with focusing on faces. Focusing on the face is important because it is the earliest form of social communication. It helps children to pick up social signals. Children with autism, as you well know by now, are not usually comfortable looking at the face and often miss these social cues.You will often notice that a child with autism is more comfortable looking at your mouth or only part of a face than the whole face in general. What is recommended for these exercises is to take 15 minutes, 3 times per day with your child, free from other distractions. You should pick only one or two of these activities and repeat the same ones for at least a week before switching it up because children with autism latch onto routine.
- Play peek-a-boo games with blankets, pillows, or even the shower curtain
- Exaggerate your smiles and facial animations so that your face does not blend into the background and move your face slowly in different directions so that it is easy for your child to focus on it. Put your face in their line of vision. For example, if you see your child on the floor with the choo choo train, put your face next to the choo choo train as it moves. It seems silly but your child is more comfortable with objects right now, you need to show them that human faces aren't threatening.
- play binoculars. Take turns looking at each other through an object (we used a toilet paper roll) or by making circles with your fingers. bring the circle they are looking through to your mouth, your nose, your eyes, etc. to let your child become comfortable with the different parts of your face.
- Encourage your child to smile into a mirror while identifying facial features. Kiss the nmirror. Identify facial features on a doll.
- Make several copies of a picture of your face. Have your child seperate your face from pictures of strangers.
- Make different pictures of your face with different experessions. Name the different expressions as you flip through the cards.
- Ask everyone who comes into the house or has regular contact with your child to put their face at your child's eye level when entering the room with him or her. Tell them to call the child's name and wait until he or she looks at them before moving forward.
- when offering juice or food or a toy, always put it next to your face and wait for him or her to look at your face before giving it to them
These are just a few to get you started. Like I said, I can't really post all of it because the kinks are still being worked out. This is just some beginning stuff. I'd love to hear how it goes!
I forgot to mention if anyone else has tips for this, I'm open too! I love hearing positive, constructive feedback! However, if something doesn't work for your particular child, it doesn't work so try one of the other things. Just wanted to clarify, I don't want to sound like a pompous know-it-all. 
I just know how much I appreciate the help when I can find it!
Destiny, You are always amazing me with your innovations! I think this is wonderful. We will all be happy to hear about the results.
You are never pompous, or "Know it all", just very resourceful and I certainly admire all your efforts on behalf of your children. Keep us posted....sounds exciting.....Beth100
Alaric's actually getting really good with eye contact. His speech therapist told me to do some of those things. Holding toys next to my face and making him look at me to get the toy seems to help the most. I hold the toy, say the name of the toy, and encourage him to look at me and try to say the name. He's fascinated with animal sounds right now, so I'll hold a toy animal up by my mouth and make its sound.
Earlier this week he was playing by himself with an animal and I heard him say, "cow, mooooo." I was so excited that he said it spontaneously that I didn't bother to tell him it was a pony! LOL
Lori
Quoting 3plus3equals5:
Alaric's actually getting really good with eye contact. His speech therapist told me to do some of those things. Holding toys next to my face and making him look at me to get the toy seems to help the most. I hold the toy, say the name of the toy, and encourage him to look at me and try to say the name. He's fascinated with animal sounds right now, so I'll hold a toy animal up by my mouth and make its sound.
Earlier this week he was playing by himself with an animal and I heard him say, "cow, mooooo." I was so excited that he said it spontaneously that I didn't bother to tell him it was a pony! LOL
That is just SO awesome! Who cares right now if it's the right one?!? It's a word, right?!? GO ALARIC!
Thank goodness for the classes my Son did have when he was younger , they worked a ton on the face's and the emotions also how to get a child with autism to relate to what your facial expression mean . I have had a Sesame Street CD for Kyle for years that shows a face when he is happy or sad or mad , then he tells you to click on the face of someone who is sad , then it shows a sad face . I really think that has helped Kyle tremendously .. As for the eye contact thing , I have heard that when they are trying to listen to you it is better that they don't have to look at you , it is to much for them to try to read your eye's plus try to comprehend what you are saying all at the same time . So as far as when your talking to your child , I myself don't make my son look at me when I am talking to him . He gets it more when he is just trying to listen not doing both , If that makes sense at all .... I hope so .. hugs Momma that is a pretty darn good way to start to get them to be able to see what we might be feeling emotionally !! thanks destiny .. COOL .
Quoting MommyJanice44:
Thank goodness for the classes my Son did have when he was younger , they worked a ton on the face's and the emotions also how to get a child with autism to relate to what your facial expression mean . I have had a Sesame Street CD for Kyle for years that shows a face when he is happy or sad or mad , then he tells you to click on the face of someone who is sad , then it shows a sad face . I really think that has helped Kyle tremendously .. As for the eye contact thing , I have heard that when they are trying to listen to you it is better that they don't have to look at you , it is to much for them to try to read your eye's plus try to comprehend what you are saying all at the same time . So as far as when your talking to your child , I myself don't make my son look at me when I am talking to him . He gets it more when he is just trying to listen not doing both , If that makes sense at all .... I hope so .. hugs Momma that is a pretty darn good way to start to get them to be able to see what we might be feeling emotionally !! thanks destiny .. COOL .
OOPS! Mommyjanice just reminded me I forgot a KEY element in these exercises- you're not supposed to be working on anything else while you are doing these exercises- so you're not trying to force speech, academic learning (abc's, 123's,) etc. The idea is to just be with your child and offer yourself and your face as an option. If your child is trying to figure out what you are saying, immitate you or be forced to do something he or she doesn't want to do- you will not get results. Focus only on the activity. Thanks Mommyjanice!
Another thing that works with Alaric is making silly noises with my mouth (raspberries, animal sounds, whatever). He'll watch my face and laugh. Sometimes we go back and forth making silly noises at each other. Sometimes I copy the sound he's making, and sometimes he copies me. It's fun, and he now looks me right in the eye as we're laughing hysterically. :)
Lori
Quoting 3plus3equals5:
Another thing that works with Alaric is making silly noises with my mouth (raspberries, animal sounds, whatever). He'll watch my face and laugh. Sometimes we go back and forth making silly noises at each other. Sometimes I copy the sound he's making, and sometimes he copies me. It's fun, and he now looks me right in the eye as we're laughing hysterically. :)
It's funny that you mention this too. That's in unit 2- turn taking. You can do this with all kinds of noises, rasberries is a good one, sometimes we just immitated certain syllables back and forth. One time we spent ten minutes just going "pa" "pa" back and forth. ;) The idea is to engage the child in spending time with you as opposed to lining things up, spinning things, flipping the lights off and on, talking on and on about one subject only, etc. - to get them to notice there are other people in the world and it can be fun to share. Turn taking is essential in conversation and conversation is rarely ever just with words. (It is online but in person, not so much.) A conversation can be had just with facial expressions, I do this all the time with my husband- he knows exactly what I mean when I lift one eye brow. So step one is to get them to look at your face, once they can do that without having a lot of issues, you can move on to taking turns like the noises, throwing a ball back and forth, holding each other's hands and pushing or pulling to "Row, row row your boat," sing a song that the child knows but pause every once in a while and allow them to "fill in" the missing word (this can be done with books too), we even did this game where he had to learn to wait his turn by running across the room- I took a turn and he waited for me to point to him for his turn to run over and join me. But, like I said you have to be able to get their attention first. After you get pretty good at turn taking, you can move on to joint attention which is the hardest part. Joint attention is the subtle shift in our eyes and faces when we are talking to someone about the same object or subject; we will move our gaze from the object to the person we are speaking to and back to the object again as we talk. We often do this subconsciously, but we do it to make sure we are understanding or expressing our ideas properly. People with autism tend to either just stare at the person or stare at the object or stare off in another direction entirely. 
They can rarely demonstrate joint attention without a conscious effort and practice which is why it is so hard for them to learn and so hard to pick up on when a conversation starts or ends, why they miss the social cues. (There are other reasons too of course, but joint attention is a key component.) So you want to practice unit one- getting them to look at your face, then unit 2- learning to take turns and then comes the hard part of learning to combine those skills.
I'd say we're definitely at stage 2. And yes, we do syllables back and forth, as well as the other noises. He enjoys making lots of different sounds. He's nowhere near joint attention yet. We're still working on turn-taking in other activities. It's hard for him to wait, he gets impatient. Then again, it's hard for any 2 year old to wait :)
Lori
Wow, quite a reaction
- destiny29
on Nov. 15, 2009 at 7:17 PM