Children with autism can often learn new concepts quickly when given multiple exemplar training, repetition, and reinforcement for correct responding. However the difficulty lies with teaching our students to generalize and discriminate. This month I have been focusing on identifying nouns, verbs, and adjectives in my reading group. We incorporated angry birds and fruit ninja to make it fun and engaging (get the free printables in those links!). My kids had a blast and seemingly quickly mastered each topic. However once we work on discriminating between nouns, verbs, and adjectives – the flood gates of confusion opened up.
Spend Extensive Time Teaching and Practicing Discrimination
In your lesson planning and scheduling – make you really allow a substantial amount of teaching time to ensure that your students can discriminate between concepts. Teach the “far off” discriminations – two words or concepts that are completely different but also teach the “close in” discriminations – two words that are actually quite similar. So the difference between cry and sad? Which is the verb and which is the adjective?
We did a lot of practice and activities to work on discrimination between nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Directly Teach Generalization of Skills
Teachers and parents sometimes assume that once a student can accomplish a skill within a structured task or learning center – they can do it everywhere. WRONG. Our students need to be directly taught how to use this skill in other environments. You need to plan for teaching generalization. There are a lot of great activities out there to make teaching generalization fun and engaging – which it should be! Generalization is using the skill in your real life.
We did a really fun activity to work on generalization of noun/verb/adjectives. I photocopied a page in a book and we used different colored highlighters to color code the parts of speech. Color coding + generalization + a literacy task = ugh, have I died and gone to multi-tasking teacher heaven? Love it! It was challenging but my kiddos did great 🙂
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