autismspectrumspectrum-blog
autismspectrumspectrum-blog
Teaching students with autism spectrum disorder
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autismspectrumspectrum-blog ยท 8 years ago
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Teaching students with autism spectrum disorder
I have experienced the most amazing opportunity. The past couple of weeks I have spent each Tuesday and Thursday volunteering at a cultural skills camp for autistic kids. The camp was held at the school where I is going to be teaching Drama at in the fall. This is a school for children with learning differences and you can find definitely kids on the Teaching students with autism spectrum disorder enrolled at the school. However, most of the children I caused at the summertime camp are a lot more challenged than the students who attend the school through the year.
When I arrived the initial day I was asked to be the first choice for the high school group as their teacher was on vacation. I was happy to possess this assignment as I adore teenagers and desired to jump right in with the group. I didn't have a hint what you may anticipate, but the camp director said that the kids were sweet and more or less took care of themselves. She gave me the camp schedule for the day and asked me to talk, talk, talk, in their mind, reminding me that the goal was to obtain them interacting as much as possible.
When I entered the classroom there were 6 or 7 young teenagers sitting at desks, looking worried. I introduced myself and told them that their teacher was on a break and asked them each their names. They responded in my experience in voices that ranged from very loud - a young man with two hearing aids, to cartoonish, some speaking in high squeaky voices. There clearly was also a child whose language skills were limited and who said almost nothing except to repeat back in my experience what I had asked him. All of the kids were able to hold casual conversations and responded fairly normally, but there were a couple of kids who gave one word answers or appeared not to understand the questions I'd asked.
The kid's range of quantities of functioning was very interesting to me. I wondered as I held a relaxed conversation with among the kids who actually appeared "normal" in every way, what he should be thinking to stay a scenario with other kids have been much more debilitated. Was this an obstacle for these children emotionally? Or did they understand that while these were perhaps never as stranded socially as some of the fellow campers, they needed the skills practice provided by the camp?
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Later I had the opportunity to listen to the conversation of a couple of girls at the camp. They certainly were discussing other school programs and speaking about the meds these were on, the therapists they went to, the programs they attended, and the types of issues one other participants at the programs were dealing with. They appeared to ingest stride the indisputable fact that these were identified as having a debilitating condition and were very openly discussing the conditions that arose when coping with Teaching students with autism spectrum disorder. Again I wondered; what is it like for a child to be this type of "different?" How much courage it must bring them everyday to move through their lives, to use and plot a class through the social world we all struggle in at times. Where we "normal" people struggle, with no added burden of coping with a disorder which makes everything we experience more confusing and harder to navigate.
The kids who appeared to be completely unmindful of what was going on I soon discovered, were anything but oblivious. The almost completely silent teenagers soon proved in my experience that these were not merely aware, but that these were constantly processing what was happening around them. I found that with enough support, they could participate and communicate appropriately.
One such instance of communication took place at the gymnastics facility where we had brought the campers. There clearly was one boy who'd been at the camp for two weeks before he'd even said one word to anyone. Only just recently, he'd begun to talk at all, but he seemed to really have a transformation at the gym. The very first time I noticed a change in him was when I was supervising the kids at the bouncing castle at one corner of the big room. There were 4 or 5 teens bouncing away for their hearts content and I was so surprised to see this mostly silent, normally worried looking guy, boinging around with the others. He'd a huge grin on his face! Somehow the physical activity and the whimsical nature of the place we were visiting seemed to possess broken through the barrier inside of him. He responded with a huge smile to my requests he bounce higher and higher, and he make an effort to touch the ceiling together with his head. And then, when a fellow camper fell over and was struggling to obtain up, this boy, who'd not seemed the least bit aware in the classroom of the wants of anybody at all, reached his hand down unbidden and helped his friend up.
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