Teaching Tips :: Special Education

Angela Nelson received her BA and JD from UCLA where she studied and practiced behavior psychology under Dr. Ivar Lovaas, and her Ed.M. at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, with a focus on technology innovation and education. As Founder and CEO of Stages Learning Materials, Angela has created autism, special needs and early childhood curriculum products since 1997. In addition to her duties at Stages, Angela writes for multiple industry publications and does development consultation for CS4Ed Consulting Services for Education.

Emerging Technology for Autism

In the field of autism technology, probably the most talked about recent development has been iPad apps that are bridging the communication gap often associated with autism. Six months ago, a simple iTunes store search for “autism apps” turned up 243 results. That same search this morning rendered 1054 apps. Apps, however, are just one isolated example of the range of technological advances that are being applied to autism. Further, many apps, are not necessarily transformative, or even particularly novel. Rather much of what is available via iPad and tablet computer for autism is simply a digitization of existing content.

The Importance of Categorization

Learning to categorize items is a basic task for young children. Close your eyes for a moment and picture a typical pre-school classroom: children are sorting little plastic bears, red bears in one tub, blue in another, and green in a third; another group of children arranges pictures into different piles of animals, vehicles, and foods; and still a third group is reading a book about animals that live in the sea vs. animals that can fly! We instinctively know it is important to sort things into categories… but do we know why?

Building Language for your Autistic Child

Emerging Language and Building Vocabulary

Language development varies from child to child, and there are wide ranges of expected “normal” language development in young children. If you have specific concerns about the pace of your child’s language development, you should definitely discuss this with your health care professional. However, for reference sake, by the age of two a child is expected to be able to:

Back to School Success for Students with Autism

New routine, new teachers, new classrooms…. New, New, New! This can be stressful for all children, but even more so for children with autism and related special needs. What can you do to minimize stress and maximize success in the new school year? Here are some ABC’s to help you and your child.

Activities:

What will your child do on a day to day basis at their new school? Which activities will they be doing with a mainstream class? Which activities will they be working on in a one-on one setting?

Building Full Sentences

The most popular use of the Language Builder Picture Card Series is to build vocabulary. The realistic and current photos help students to learn the name of various nouns, occupations, and emotions. In the beginning, this task can be very repetitive and basic, focusing only on learning single-word responses. When a child with autism begins to gain expressive language skills, parents and educators are thrilled to watch these new words emerge.

Autism Education

Stages Learning Materials began as a company dedicated to publishing Autism Teaching Tools.

The Language Builder Series was created specifically to include all of the images necessary to teach matching, receptive labeling and expressive labeling across multiple subject areas.

Here is a list of our products which were created specifically to teach children with autism:

Teaching Kids with Autism about Emotions

Parents and educators often struggle to help children with Autism communicate their feelings. When children with Autism have trouble recognizing and communicating how they feel, it may contribute to inappropriate behaviors such as tantruming and aggression, or even increased social withdrawal. If our kids could tell us how they feel, they would be less frustrated, and we would be better able to help solve their dissatisfaction.

Unfortunately teaching children with Autism to understand and identify their feelings is a complex task…. After all, many so-called normal adults struggle to communicate their feelings!

Community Helper and Occupation Flash Cards for Autism

There are so many people our children need to interact with on a weekly basis – teachers, doctors, bus drivers, dentists, janitors, crossing guards, store clerks, mail carriers…. Meeting new people can be difficult for any child, but children with autism often have a particularly difficult time with people they don’t know, or who are not part of their typical routine.

Autism: Using Games to Promote Peer Interaction

We all know how difficult it can be to facilitate healthy interactions between children on the autism spectrum and their typically developing peers. The stereotypic “stimming” behaviors that are often present in children with autism, combined with a lack of appropriate social behaviors, tend to alienate other children and reduce the opportunities for peer interaction. Healthy social relationships are critical for early development, so it is extremely important to build some skills in children with autism that will help them relate to and interact with other children.

Basic Matching Activities

Basic matching is one of the first lessons taught in an ABA program with kids with Autism. Generally a therapist will start with “nesting items” such as bowls or cups. You put one bowl on the table and hand the other bowl to the child. Then you teach the child to “match” the two items.

Gradually you work toward matching pictures of items rather than the real items. The picture of the cat goes with the picture of the cat (not the pineapple!). When you begin to teach matching with pictures, you start by matching identical pictures (2 exact duplicate cat pictures, for example). Then you move to similar card matching(matching the picture of the grey cat to the picture of the orange cat).


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