Harold and the Purple Crayon sparks creativity for kids with ASD

by Jax Chachitz
Creative Spectrum

Harold and the Purple Crayon is a fabulous book series that I find really useful for many reasons. All you need is the book and a purple crayon or what I use is a white board with a purple marker. You can easily get a copy from your Public Library. The illustrations are fairly easy to copy and it is great to work on reading comprehension, copying the images, asking questions about the story, encouraging your child to draw in pictures, following a storyline, etc.

My son absolutely loves for me to draw out the pictures and sometimes we try to go a step further and act out the scenes with random improv props. Its fascinating to see what he comes up with. For Harold going to the moon, we used a bed comforter for the moon and some bristle blocks for a rocket. We scrunched up paper as moon rocks and collected those in a bag. Really, the book series is fabulous and if you just use your imagination to inspire and create, you will inspire your child to have some fun coming up with ideas. All of these skills can sometimes be very difficult for kids with Autism, ASD, PDD, and Speech and Language delays. I find creating an art project or acting activity and sprinkling your speech and language, Q & A or whatever you happen to working on at the moment into the play helps to practice and work on the things that are more difficult. Let Harold animate your childs world.

Art lesson for children with Autism: Collage Stories

This will be an ongoing series of ideas for teaching art to kids on the Autism Spectrum. My goal is to tailor and customize solutions for teaching kids with Autism about art and creating art.

Create collages with paper. Use familiar images from childrens books.
The basic premise is to cut or rip small pieces of paper to create a collage of color like a mosaic.

Supplies needed: Scissors, Glue, Favorite Book, Old Magazines or Construction Paper.

When I was first introduced to this concept, we used newspaper. We took a classical image, projected and mapped out an outline onto a large piece of paper (about the size of a wall) and then collaged the gradations of color with only using black, gray and white. This was a great undertaking in terms of reproducing color into black and white and really seeing the values of color through limited color. I am not suggesting this as the final project for the little ones but as a variation.

You begin by finding a favorite character or book illustration. Place the page on a window and trace the outline onto a white piece of paper. Or trace the outline anyway possible, even share this as part of the process, as outlining is a good skill to have. You begin by cutting or ripping the small to medium pieces of a paper in various colors represented in the story. You may want to stick to simple graphic like images for an easier activity. Share in ripping, cutting and glueing the various pieces into the outlines. Your child will enjoy representing the various sections. You can even expand the concept and use magazine pictures for silly noses, eyes, body parts. The important thing is to have fun. Always remember these projects are about learning to use tools for expression, visually representing images with color and shapes, and most of all enjoying the experience of creating.

There are many famous artists that use collage as an art form. Utilizing scraps of paper, magazine cut outs of what exists visually is a great way to incorporate instant color, images to create stories and encourage spontaneous ideas with simple tools. You can even embellish objects, similar to decoupage and decorate crafts. Another trick for getting that exact image you are looking for, the google image search tool or online clip art.

Jax Chachitz

Art Play Project: Social play, creating stories with playdoh

I have decided to experiment with incorporating social stories into art projects. You can view some information from various websites like, what are social stories by Carol Gray. You can view her website The Gray Center with links to purchase products. But you can also find a few free samples stories to play with. I have not ventured into using the concept of the social story to create a social dynamic to reference but to enhance speech that is appropriate for social interaction. Hope this makes sense to you all! Book image above is from musickit.com, the original book I have was a song by tom Glazer and Illustrations by Rob Barber, Goodyear Books, Harper Collins Publisher.


For example:
Art Play Project: Playdoh and the book "On Top of Spaghetti"
We begin by making spaghetti, meatballs and cheese with the clay and create the props to act out the story/song for "On Top of Spaghetti" song book. After and during the project I write a simple story, that we read together to document the activity. I was thinking of also taking photos for visual reference. Here is a simple story.

"My name is -------. I am playing with Playdoh with my mommy. I like playdoh. My favorite color is -------. We are reading the book on top of spaghetti. I am making spaghetti with the spaghetti maker. We push and push and push the red playdoh in the maker . Help me. We made spaghetti. Yeah. "

I am finding that incorporating stories has helped to encourage familiar speech, fill in the blanks, and expanding spontaneous appropriate phrases. I have to purchase a simple photo printer for on the spot printing of images. Will post more when this happens as I think the visual cue will be an interesting dynamic to retell the story and add more to the story as we progress.
There seems to be a real lack of toys that can simulate these types of interactions for practicing fluid spontaneous back and forth speech. Any ideas or suggestions out there?
I also have found a link to a boyscout page that has the classic song. On Top of Spaghetti.

jax chachitz