cards, activities, online games and free downloads as well as resources to purchase. Check out the facial expressions and feelings games (both of which are free).
www.tinsnips.org
Tinsnips is a special education resource that strives to share a variety of specialized teaching tools, techniques, worksheets and activities with teachers and parents of children who have autism spectrum disorders. Tinsnips provides links to information, organizations, techniques and strategies especially for teaching children on the autism spectrum. It also provides ideas for things to do and make, and hands-on, functional activities that address multi-sensory learning styles and promote higher order thinking skills. There are worksheets for sale and for free.
www.enchantedlearning.com
Lots of printables and activity ideas, many of which are free. For a reasonable subscription cost you can have full access to all printables on the site.
www.learningpage.com
Free membership to access clip art and worksheets with a high visual content.
Websites for interactive games
www.abilitations.com
Follow the links to ‘The Speech Bin Store – Autism’ to find purpose-made software to encourage language building, or look under ‘products’ for activity guides and for free PDF downloads of communication activities.
www.mousetrial.com
Free and to purchase (at reasonable cost) printables and online games.
www.whychristmas.com
Christmas interactive activities and printables.
www.welltown.gov.uk
Welltown is aimed at Key Stage 1 pupils, aged 5 to 7 years, and covers the main areas of personal, social and health education (PSHE) and citizenship set out in the National Curriculum. Even though the site is suited to readers, it is very visual and easy to navigate with lots of activities for non-readers – especially the bug killing game to encourage hand washing after using the bathroom!
www.jambav.com
Online games with a focus on children with special needs including autism.
www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games
Fun interactive games at all ability levels.
www.bbc.co.uk/schools
Look under the link for ‘pre-school’ for motivating cause and effect and TV character-based learning activities.
Using interactive computer games with your child
Playing at the computer
Just like the TV, the computer can be a hugely supportive piece of home technology that can assist us on our journey to find ways for our children to play, learn and engage. Just like the TV it can also be a source of solitary unsociable entertainment that drains the time a child has to learn by engaging, watching and interacting with others – we have to be smart in how we use this technology and tune into our child’s relationship with it.
Why are computer activities particularly useful for children with ASDs?
Computer activities have huge cause and effect potential – teaching a child that is reluctant to interact that even a small movement (such as pressing one key) can have a big effect on what happens on the screen. Empowering a child by showing him that he can have control over consequences shows him that engaging with activities is a positive and comforting source of interaction – the same action produces the same consequence every time.
Computer activities can capture attention where other activities have failed. There is merit in saying that a child should be learning language through the typical routes of watching and imitating others, but our atypical children sometimes need novel and varied ways of being introduced to the same concept. Computer images are lively, entertaining and hard to ignore.
Children with autism often find technology attractive and are drawn to computers. We can therefore capitalize on an activity to which our child might already be receptive.
Direct face-to-face learning can be so overwhelmingly uncomfortable that our child resists, ignores or switches off their attention. It may be that while we work on fun interactive activities to help our child be more comfortable with eye contact and communication, we can move more challenging learning activities to tolerable ‘side-by-side’ learning at the computer.
The nature of early learning at the computer is that spoken language is underplayed and visual learning is emphasized, putting children with receptive language difficulties at an advantage by using visual logic rather than audible speech to make sense of an activity. Even if they do not ‘think in pictures’, children with autism appear to consistently process visual information more easily than auditory information, and the computer uses this strong processing channel to the full.
At what age should children be engaging with the computer?
It would be fair to say there is no need to bring any three-year-old (whether with autism or not) to the computer. Particularly for children with autism there are so many areas of learning to work on that mastering a mouse must join the queue behind walking, coping with sensory issues and rudimentary nonverbal communication.
Once again with children on the autism spectrum we cannot be bound by ‘ages and stages’ of what our child should be learning and when. Computer activities controversially aimed at very young children (toddlers) may actually be highly appropriate to your nine-year-old – these usually consist of simple random on-screen cause-and-effect actions, for example your child hits any key and on the screen something exciting happens. With a healthy and responsible attitude, the computer can enhance our child’s motivation to engage and his ability to learn, without it being some sinister object in the corner competing for his already precious attention.
How do I encourage awareness that I am part of the activity?
Part of this ‘healthy’ attitude is to foster an awareness right from the start that using the computer is something that is done with you, rather than you setting your child up with a game and leaving them to it.
If you are using a picture schedule, use a card for ‘computer’ that includes yourself (or shows two people) in the
