Kids on the spectrum who have trouble with behavioral flexibility fortunately a lot of the interventions are not unlike what we do for kids anyway in classrooms. It’s just they have to be more explicit and more pervasive for these kids. So we want a lot of predictability and routine in the structure.
We want the day’s schedule up on the board. If there’s a change to the schedule we want to highlight what different but we also want to highlight what’s the same thing. So that we don’t leave the kid adrift. We want to focus on transitions, because shifting is part of what’s hard. So we want to help build a bridge between one activity and the next until the child works through some of those issues.
So an example. I was working with a first grader. The complaints that the teacher had was that the child was too wild when he came in from the playground after recess and that despite there being another child assigned to the put the chairs on the desks he had to go around and straighten them each time.
This is a bright child who was really at the end of his rope by the end of the day. And my suggestion was why don’t you add a job? How about there being another job and that job is to double check to make sure that the chairs are lined up well on the desks?
I didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t just go with that child’s need for order and sameness and not make that a struggle. So that became his job every day and that totally settled down. Coming in off the playground we structured an unstructured time for him. What we did was we gave him a job. Your job every day is to help me collect all of the playground equipment before you come inside.
I’m going to bring out a big basket and at five minutes before it’s time to come inside I’m going to tell you it’s time to start collecting everything. I’m go to hold the basket and you’re going to go get the balls, whatever other toys the kids have, put them in the basket and you and I are going to walk into the classroom together.
And it totally changed the nature of the task for him because now he had a structured job to do; he was no longer anxious, he knew exactly what the routine was going to be.
