Aut Aut

Autistic child

F. is an autistic child of 6, attending the first year of elementary school.

His cognitive skills are almost typical, he is able to read letters, words and sentences and numbers untill 30. He is also able to memorise new concepts he has just learned. To learn new abilities, he needs a lot of structure: a table and a chair to be able to stay calm and to pay attention, an individual special educator who can help him, very little sensory stimuli such as a limitation in visual and auditory “noises”. All these conditions enable him to be concentrated and to focus his attention on the activity.

Being autistic, his communication and social abililties are very compromised: F. is rarely able to express a desire or a need or to do a comment, but, in the contrary, he is able to answer to some simple questions using brief sentences of 3-4 words and to speak about something he knows very well. Frequently, his speech is characterised by the repetition of non-sense words or sentences heard at the tv. He uses speech and sounds as selfstimulation and not in a significant and communicative way.

Such as the auditory system seems to be compromised (not organically, but in the functional use), the visual one shows some peculiar characteristics too. He is frequently interested in everything is moving or is disappearing, such as opening ad closing doors or trays, hand fingers, and everything can reflect light, such as leads, glasses and windows. Often this special interest compromise his ability to pay attention to words and people.

When he has free time, he usually preferes playing alone (whatching leaps and cars outside the window, repeating some of his favourite songs, running all around the play area, etc.).

The work with him has been set to achieve the following objectives:

- the extinction of behavior problems (such as issuing screams and the production of non-contextualized sentences). In this case, the modus operandi that we have adopted is the use of token economy, by which we try to model the behavior of F. rewarding correct answers with a “star” and do not strengthen the inadequate response. At the moment, this strategy has become the best working with him and is used in all operational contexts.

Token economy:

 

Even when using the token, F. continues to give answers that are inconsistent with our demands, we use what is called “negative punishment”: the removal of the pleansing activity or object.

- Training on making functional questions: we know that making question is one of the most difficult and important skill the child with autism needs to master. For this reason, we try to improve F.’s ability on making spontaneous questions, by modifying the context. For example, at the moment of break, all the children usually eat some fruit. F. cannot bring it by himself, but he can ask to the adult “Can I have some apple?”. Everytime he is able to produce a functional-communicative sentence, the adult gives him whatever he wants.

- Give an answer to social questions: this is one of the crucial social skill. We usually work on this skill in semi-structured and structured contexts, in order to promote spontaneous conversation and trying to limit the ecoic prompt (without suggesting the answer verbally). This way to work on language use has been necessary because we have been able to verify that he usually repeats words without paying attention to what he says, simply trying to give the answer we expect. The type of prompt used and consequently an informative prompt, such as we suggest some cues to help him give the correct answer.

- At school the day is very structured and F. has the chance to move easily between the different activities through the use of his personal agenda, that is a sequence of every activity is giong to do during the school day.

- F. is following the school curriculum (such as his classmates, excvept for english and music), participating to the various activities: Italian, mathematics, drawing, reading stories and do exercises and workshops engines. To verify and consolidate what he has learned, we have also provided to have some moments of individual work taking place in personal “little” room, to allow the child to concentrate more easily and keep his attention longer on the task. These activities consist primarily in the revision of work already done in class, in imitation of the design and in moments of conversation, to improve the ability of F. to describe objects and situations by providing as much detail as possible.

- As mentioned above, the area most seriously compromised in the behavior of F. is the relational and that is why we work a lot to improve his social skills. Work in a natural environment is fundamental to create the multiple situations in which the child is "forced" to enter into relation with other people, especially with his peers. In this perspective, we structured the moments of work in small groups, during which F. has the opportunity to socialize and to increase its effectiveness in relation to others. The activities that are mostly playful and attractive, so that for F. is easier and more pleasant to spend time with his classmates (together with the track playing marbles, make puzzles and draw something to eat together). During these moments it is important that the child starts a comunication with his peer: the function of the adult is to help F. to respond correctly to the other children and never replace any of the two “speakers”.

Ilaria, F.’s individual teacher