How to Communicate With Your Child Best - Visually
Temple Grandin said “if I cannot visualise it, I cannot comprehend it”. This suggests both an approach to communication and a strategy for teaching. So let’s see how we can use it to best advantage.
Everybody has a preferred sensory modality for processing and storing information. Some people think in pictures, remember visually, while others think in language converting all to words. Others again will encode their thoughts in terms of feelings. NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming makes use of this to suggest the best way to reach agreement and is a system used by both psychologists and sales people. There is evidence that two people communicating in the same modality will understand each other better. So for example the visual thinkers will talk in terms of sights, colours and see the other person’s point of view. The verbal thinkers will verbalise their thoughts and hear out each other’s arguments while those more in tune with sensations will comment in terms of feelings.
Children with ASD are strong visual thinkers often with a deficit in the language area, which presumably makes them even more reliant on their visual modality. Parents often marvel at their extraordinary visual memory for routes travelled, places visited and ability to memorise logos, alphabets and numerals at a very early age. Some can remember details of scenes in a video played long ago, replaying it in their head. Others can remember visual detail to incredible precision.
So how can we harness this aptitude for teaching language, improving behaviours, teaching independence skills, and teaching mathematical concepts.
Let’s start with communication.
At ISADD we use visual picture-graphs or COMPIC. The power of Picture Exchange (as in PECS) is now well documented. How does this work in bringing spoken language to so many children?
If a child cannot discriminate and remember sound patters, they will be meaningless and therefore soon ignored. By associating a visual symbol with a meaning we give the child opportunity to use it as a language code, to let us know what he/she wants. However, if each visual word is also associated with a sound, the verbal word, then this also is associated to the meaning and the child listens and understands. Focusing attention on the sound patterns then helps the child remember and reproduce words when the visual picture is foremost in his mind. Usually when children begin to verbalise their first sentences they follow the invisible words with their finger as they speak, as if the visual sentence strip was there in front of them. With fluency this disappears. You may ask how a child starts speaking without being actually taught. The child is taught to associate a symbol with sound and associate meaning with the symbol. The association between meaning and sound happens without needing to be taught and the child starts remembering the sound pattern and starts labelling, first the symbols, then all the objects that the symbol stands for. This process is known as ‘equivalence’ (Sidman pointed out that if you associate A and B, and also B and C the
association between A and C happens naturally). We do not need to ask the child to verbalise as without this visual support it brings a lot of stress and the voice end up very strained and unnatural. If we wait till the child can do it by himself, voice will be relaxed.
In this way we can use those special visual skills to develop the listening and auditory memory skills that are restricted.
Many have sequencing issues and though they know the words these are not presented in a grammatical sequence verbally. This is where the template comes in, and the colour coding allows the child to sequence words grammatically.
Let’s look at behaviour. Behaviour is guided by its value to the person, and everyone will work to get a reinforcement that they see as beneficial to them. Though it may not seem so, children’s misbehaviour is in their eye purposeful, be it to get entertainment, attention or something they want. Sometimes it is just fear of not knowing what is going on, what is happening to them. Schedules and placing activities on a calendar can get you past many situations. If you can communicate to the child that what he/she wants will happen in a little while, you may bypass the tantrum. Often it is not understanding what will happen that upsets them. A simple schedule will communicate a sequence of activities the child may be able to accept graciously. It certainly reduces the stress of not knowing what is happening and where you are being taken to.
Token economies are away of playing for time before you deliver the reinforcement. The child sees that his/her good behaviour is being noted and that eventually the reward will be there. This is a great way of giving the child feedback on behaviour, with tokens being placed on the board while behaviours are positive and a token removed (we call it response cost) when behaviour lapses. The child sees the direct connection between his/her behaviour and consequences. It eliminates the third person effect of someone telling them they are wrong which elicits an anger response we do not need.
Another way to improve behaviour is to use visual rules. We know that ASD leads to rule bound and potentially obsessive behaviours, and in this case we can use it. Once the child has some basic form of visual communication, we can communicate rules. We write/draw them in a rule book and the child will take the rules to heart. It will not happen at once, so be patient but it will happen if the child sees the rules often enough. Be very careful that your rules are flexible enough and appropriate for all situations not to cause problems later, and not to lead to guilt feelings.
It is also important to ensure that self esteem is not damaged by the many little failures children with ASD will experience in their day-to–day life among verbal communicators. I really value the ‘Cool Book’ as a way to document their achievement and successes. This should have pictures of situations where they did well, had fun, were successful. Also point out the challenges overcome, particularly when an item can be move from the rule book to the cool book as the challenge has been achieved.
Using visual supports to teach independence skills. The beauty of visual supports is that we do not have to be present. This allows for fading the prompting. Once sequences are understood and our child likes rules there will be no problem working through a sequence of instructions, be it to load a dish washer or to take a shower independently. Each step on the sequence will be undertaken diligently, and it is then important to fade the picture graphs and just leave list of blanks which also can then be faded. (If we use verbal prompts and verbal memory for a sequence is poor, we may need to stand by that shower for many years.)
Teaching mathematical thinking. We all know that IT skills come naturally to children with ASD, that the best (and richest) individuals in the IT world are on the spectrum and that we hope for our little one with ASD will get there too. But how do we achieve this. We cannot trust school to teach, as school is geared for the verbal child. (Even Einstein failed math and left school at 15.). This is why ISADD focuses on visual math, on establishing visual concepts before they are subjected to verbal math which relies of verbal memory. Most children can count as a verbal recitation before they have any concept of number or quantity. It is a useless skill, so please do not teach even if your child can learn the verbal pattern.
We start by teaching number as a visual concept with those dot cards. This establishes one-to-one correspondence which has to be generalised to all items. We also use Cuisenaire rods as they give the foundation of ratio and size relationship, which also relates to number.
Addition is taught as a concept where the child blends two sets without ever seeing them together. This means that an addition task is not passed simply by recognizing a given visual set. The aim is to memorise all combinations to 10 to the level of automation.
Beyond 10, the MAB system of teaching with concrete support if very simple in explaining units, tens and hundreds visually. Verbally this is not an easy task, but with MAB I can usually achieve it in one session, and that includes adding and subtracting where borrowing and returning is involved.
More complex mathematical tasks, fractions and geometry are best taught visually and the foundation for them needs to be built in early. This is why we do those ‘Tangrams on Square’ while they are still little and well before they get these mathematical concepts in school. We need to fine tune their ability to see these concepts visually, because they can better than many of their typical peers.
Jura Tender.