Monday, November 28, 2011

Teaching Autistic Children to Be Independent

Not all autistic children will become independent when they grow up. However, if you as a parent or teacher do not help them achieve that independence than you will never know and your autistic child will never attain his or her full potential.

By itself, teaching children is a difficult task. Now teaching autistic children is a lot difficult than teaching normal children. You need to understand that autism is a learning disability! Of course, teaching them is not impossible, but just rather a different kind of challenge. You need to change your perspective in how they learn when teaching them. Learning disability in the case of an autistic child does not mean that they can not and will never learn, but rather it means that they just think differently.

So your goal as a parent or teacher is to help your autistic child find the right balance between learning and routine for them to live an independent and normal life. Lets face it! Life is unpredictable and anything can happen to you.

So teaching autistic children you need to find out what methods of learning best help them. You should also know the habits of your autistic child and use that to your advantage. As you might figure out, they tend to repeat things and have certain daily routines. Use those routines and repetitive behavior as part of your learning method. Learning is repetition! The challenge with teaching autistic children is to incorporate new material in to their repetitive nature to eventual make that new material part of their daily lives.

Please keep in mind that forcing anything to an autistic child will result to unwanted behavior and could be violent in nature. Even though,you will be introducing new material for the good intention of helping your child become more independent, please do introduce those material when the child is in a positive and good mood. This will insure that your autistic child will be more receptive to the lesson.

Should also realize that it will require a lot of patience teaching autistic children, since you will surely need to repeat a lot of things before your autistic child will be able to learn. Also keep in mind that they are mostly visual learners and that pictures and symbols are good for them. But please keep the learning environment, clean from visual distractions. If you remember your days in grade school with all those fancy illustrations, well please avoid that for your autistic child. Since this fancy learning tools are easy distractions for them and a pretty big source of stress for you. So keeping the room where you will be teaching autistic children is key to get their attention and focus.

The writer wishes to provide assistance to those parents and educators involved with children who has autism. Teaching Autistic Children

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_K



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