8 Autistic Teaching Strategies You Can Use With Your Kids at Home

Updated on September 29, 2020

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Trying to help your autistic child work at home?

Looking for the best autistic teaching strategies?

While it can be a challenge helping your autistic child learn at home, it can be done if you make sure to take the right approach. As long as you take the right steps and keep a few techniques in mind you’ll be able to help your child learn and have a lot of fun doing it.

Luckily, we’re here to help. Below we will tell you about the top autistic learning strategies you can use with your kids at home.

Give Simple Instructions

One of the most important things to remember when teaching your autistic child is that you need to keep your instructions as simple as possible. Always use direct language to explain new activities and exercises to your child.

Try to break down activities into just a few simple steps and give them to your child one at a time. They may have difficulty processing new information if you use complicated instructions and explanations.

By keeping things simple and clear, you’ll help ensure that your child is able to more easily understand and process the information that has been given to them.

Try Facilitated Communication

If your child has limited verbal skills, you’ll need to do whatever you can to make communication easier for them. Communicating clearly is essential when teaching your child at home.

With facilitated communication techniques, you’ll encourage your child both physically and emotionally to communicate with you using a keyboard or by pointing at images and symbols. touchscreen

You may want to consider using facilitated communication techniques when teaching your child if they have trouble communicating verbally. While these techniques have faced some controversy, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether they’re right for your child. Read it here.

Create More Structure

Adding more structure to your child’s learning environment is also essential when teaching your child at home. Providing structure to their learning schedule and lesson plans can allow them to feel more comfortable and to know what to expect each session.

Additionally, creating structure within the activities themselves can be very beneficial as well. Going into an activity, in the same way, each time and giving them the same amount of time to complete each activity can be helpful as well.

Be Patient

It’s also important that you don’t rush your child when teaching them. Instead, you should give them all of the extra time they need to process information and get their work done.

Children with ASD often need more time to process the information and instructions given to them, and if you try to rush them or even repeat the instructions again it could make it harder for them to understand.

Be sure to give your child plenty of time to process the information you’ve given to them and always be patient when teaching them something new.

Use Visual Supports

Many autistic children tend to learn best when using visual tools and stimuli. You should use visual aids whenever possible when teaching your child at home. Visual supports such as drawings, photographs, images, and shapes can all be helpful teaching tools for autistic children.

Explaining difficult directions can be problematic for autistic children, so when possible, use visual aids. Using physical items such as cubes or blocks to explain math concepts such as addition and subtraction of fractions can be very helpful.

By using visual aids, your child will be able to understand the concept much more easily than if you were to use verbal instructions alone.

Implement Positive Reinforcement

You should always try to ensure you’re minimizing stress when teaching your child at home and a great way to do this is to ensure you’re always using positive reinforcement. When they do a good job or grasp a new concept or idea be sure to reward them for it and to give them positive feedback to help them understand what they did right.

Negative reinforcement or punishments, on the other hand, can cause unneeded stress and can make it harder for your child to learn effectively.

Give Them a Well-Rounded Education

You should also be looking for ways to teach your child new things beyond just academic concepts such as math and science. It’s important that you look for ways to teach them other skills and idea that will help them in life as well.

One of the best things you can do when teaching your child is to work on building their social skills. You can use flashcards to teach your child to read facial expressions and understand body language, for example.

Taking your child to a therapy clinic can also help your child build their social skills as well. You may want to learn more from Blue Sprig Autism.

Additionally, you should also be encouraging your child’s interest in other skills and as well such as art, music, or computer programming if they show interest in any of these things.

Use Their Passions

If your child has a current obsession or interest such as dinosaurs, cars, dolls, or something else, look for ways to integrate it into their studies.

Using your child’s interests and using it in your lessons can be incredibly helpful for increasing their focus and understanding. You may want to use cars to teach your child math problems, for example, or focus on dinosaurs when teaching your child about science.  You can find great toys that suit your child’s interests at Childmode.

By using their interests and passions in their studies they’ll have a much easier time learning overall.

Making Use of These Autistic Teaching Strategies

If you want your autistic child to have an easier time learning while also having a lot of fun, you should make sure you’re taking the right approach. Be sure that you’re making use of these autistic teaching strategies if you want to have the best time teaching your child at home.

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