Austin’s occupational therapist has created a picture template to simplify building a block structure. Austin is able to place the blocks directly on the visual aid and build a garage for his car with minimal assistance from an adult (running time: 1 min. 49 sec.).
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Narrator:
This video clip shows an occupational therapist working with a boy with autism in a preschool classroom. The therapist has created a template to assist the child in building a garage with blocks.
Occupational Therapist:
Since we’re already using visual supports to give him some options for activities, I thought maybe offering him some visual supports for the actual building process would be helpful.
I think you’re exactly right. Alright, can you put them on here? Put them right on top of there. There you go.
At one of the team meetings we had we actually talked through my idea of just making him some little maps that would facilitate his building, and so the teacher and I had talked about this and agreed that maybe this was a good idea to try. So I went ahead and made the maps of things that he already has choices on his visual supports for actually choosing something to build, and I was trying to be congruent with that. So, then the next thing I wanted to do was actually go ahead and take that into the classroom and try it with him and let the teacher observe a little bit if she could just so that we could then evaluate whether this was an intervention that was really going to be helpful to him or not and if we needed to adapt it.