Communication is the base of expressing your feeling and living efficiently. Communication provides your with a mode of transport to deliver your emotions and feeling about how you want to perceive your life. Autism is a genetic disorder that affects thousands of children worldwide every year. Most of these autistic children are unable to speak properly because of which they have trouble coping up with rest of the kids. For this there are some special methods that can be used in order to teach and improve their communication skills. Here are 5 stages or strategies that can be applied to improve verbal communication of autistic children.
5 Step Communication Programme for Autistic Children
This programme that enables autistic children to communicate and spread strong visual message is tailored in such a way that it interests our understanding effectively. We spoke to Dr. Tanu Chowdhury, Clinical Psychologist from Healthcare Clinic, Lucknow to know about ways to ease communication for autistic children. She said that the level of performance and attention to detail might differ with every child because they get different autism symptoms and effect may also last longer on some individuals.
1. Brain Pillar Training
There is visual attention and memory that enables children to affect brain and let it understand the world around them. The brain has 4 pillars namely visual attention, visual memory, auditory attention and auditory memory in order to help us connect with sense organs. Because children are sensitive you need to start the training with basic visual exercises that help them visualise and retail the visual skill they have seen. Visual skills help the children development at a much faster rate and there is always this lens that can help the child to get good visual thinking skill that aids in further growth.
2. Auditory attention and memory training
Two we discussed above and the rest two are auditory and memory skills. So as visual attention and auditory memory helps to gain skills and visualisation. Now auditory attention and memory training can help to develop verbal system in autistic children. For this you need to operate at a neural system that wants the brain to function well. The visual system helps the brain to function fast because of which the verbal communication also improves. The autistic child therefore needs to learn this skill of auditory attention and memory training through some memory training.
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3. Anchoring and Developing Input Process
In this step, the focus remains on gaining self control over the words and communication skills. As we know that autistic children do have problems taking control over what they need to speak. So in this schedule and routine, it is to make them learn about the skill of controlling their language and speak effectively that were acquired from the previous training patterns.
Then exercises are introduced in order to use auditory skills and verbal skills. This helps them in the next step where they learn how to read and listen carefully. Once they have done so, it is important for them to re-enforce actions and put visual thinking, memory and auditory skill all together.
4. Developing Output Skills
This is the main step where the autistic child needs to communicate and speak about the input and training that he has got. The focus remains primarily on more formal aspect of verbal skills, both speaking and writing skills. These skills develop in this stage where the child needs to practise speaking and writing properly without any mistakes. Grades and marking system can also be built to improve and educate children.
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5. Transference
Transferring skills and building self esteem is the final step of communication so that the autistic children can talk confidently and as normal as other children. This comes with a lot of training of previous methods and steps. For this you need to give them instructions and correct them from time to time in order to learn about conference, consultations and weekly classes. You can also do Skype training with professionals or people around you. Format should be strictly judged and then accessing the training material from online libraries is important for development.
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