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.

Free Printable Why Questions Book for Children with Autism, ASD, PDD

Printable Why Question Book for Children with Autism
by Jamie Sue Austin
Free Printable Fun

Children with autism often struggle with "wh" questions like Who, What, Where, and Why. My son struggles with all of these, but I think his not being able to understand "why" is the most frustrating for both of us. There are books out there designed to teach children with autism to answer "wh" questions. My son's speech therapist uses the Buddy Bear books from Lingui Systems. They are kind of expensive so I decided to make my own versions of them.

My son's nick name is Monkey so the main character is a monkey and since it was written for him it addresses come common occurrences in our house, but it should still be of some use for others. The book addresses three "why" scenarios: "Why" Monkey wants an object, "Why" Monkey is wearing an item, and "Why" Monkey has a particular thing.

This is an interactive book. On the last two pages are images for you to cut out. You are to have the child apply the appropriate image to the story as you read it. I recommend laminating the story pages and cut outs and using velcro dots to attach the pieces to the story.

Printable Why Question Book for Children with Autism PDF

Teaching Children with Autism: Printables Can Help

By Jamie Sue Austin
Blog: Free Printable Fun

Autism is a neurological disorder that usually becomes apparent by age three. It typically causes delays in developing communication and social interaction skills. Autism currently affects 1 in 150 kids.

My son has Autism. He is an intelligent, energetic, and adventurous four year old boy. However, like most Autistic children he struggles with some basic language and speech concepts as well with understand social cause and effect. He is currently enrolled in speech therapy to help him improve his language skills. Teaching children with Autism requires a lot of repetitive instruction and learning materials that break complex social interactions or parts of language down into simple parts. Most of the resources that our speech therapist uses to teach my son come from specialized clearinghouses of special needs educational tools and are visual aides. Some can be prohibitively expensive for the average parent to purchase.

When my son had difficulty learning his prepositions I developed a printable based off of the resources his therapist was using. It worked very well. I began to incorporate other printables into our daily lives. I wrote a blog post about some of the printables I used and recieved a lot of positive feedback from parents.

Printables provide a wonderful free resource teaching children with Autism. Through my searches online I've found that there are free printables available to teach almost any concept. Some require only a small amount of modification and others require a great deal of creative thought. I use printables to teach speech and social concepts.

There are many times that I can't find the printable I want. Last year I wanted to teach my child what type of clothes to wear during what weather. We were struggling to keep him from walking outside in t-shirts during the winter! I couldn't find a printable that conveyed this lesson well. BUT, I did find an awesome picture of a little boy named Tommy at Learning Pages (free membership required). Tommy is the main character in "Tommy Tales", a free online book series available on the Learning Pages website. I used Tommy to create a folder game. My son and I spent time arranging weather conditions and clothing around and on Tommy until we had learned the concept. I encourage parents of Autistic children to create the printables they need when they can't find what they want. Or you can email me, and if I have time I'll create one for you. If you want a copy of my version of Tommy you can download it here, but keep in mind that I am most likely in severe copy write violation of the good people at Learning Pages. ****If you represent Learning Pages and would like this printable download removed just email me and I will do so.****

In this folder game I taught site words using clip art. We first started matching the pictures themselves. Then matching the words to the pictures. We ended with gluing the words under the correct pictures. Clip art is another great resource for making printables to teach any number of subjects. Good clip art (like the kind that comes from English as a second language websites like MES-English.com) can even be used as PECS. I've also used clip art to explain concepts like "Little" and "Big." I still have that printable if you need it you can download it here. The resolution wasn't very good on the clipart so of course the images are kind of fuzzy. But, it works just as well.

Printables are great for teaching children with autism conventional knowledge as well. My son and I just spent a whole day exploring frogs using printables we found online. When teaching about a subject I usually like to include a book, a craft, a puzzle or coloring page, and an activity. All of the information, ideas, and materials I needed to teach my son about frogs were available online and I managed to fill an entire rainy Saturday with froggy fun.

Don't underestimate the power of the humble printable in teaching children with Autism. Printables are a powerful tool for parents and educators. I will be creating and uploading more printables for teaching autistic children so book mark me.