Video of the Week: Using Structure to Support Participation

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day.

Sally SLP planned an adorable craft activity, but her students with autism and AAC needs just didn’t take to it. Tara Teacher brought out some age-respectful stickers to decorate cards, but several of the students stopped after placing just one sticker and got frustrated when encouraged to add more. Olivia OT pushed into the classroom as they were painting hearts to help with fine motor skill development, but some of the kids resisted doing anything more than a few brush strokes.

Sound familiar?

Art activities offer great potential for communication learning and practice, but they aren’t always preferred activities for some of our AAC students. There can be several good reasons for that, but a common problem is that the activity itself may be too open-ended. Some of our students do best with activities that have a clear beginning and ending. Open-ended activities, like many of our art projects, lack those clear markers of when the activity is over. This can lead to anxiety and resistance, but we can overcome that by adding a little structure to these unstructured activities.

Here’s a quick video explainer of one way to do that. Many thanks to the dedicated team at the Watson Institute for making and sharing this video.

Direct Link to Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrfdGjZINR8