This afternoon at Bright Futures School H and I went to Tesco for some ingredients
for flapjack. In the store, I used declarative
language, non-verbal communication and pausing to enable H to reference
me. Some of the store staff are getting
used to me wandering round the place with one or other of our pupils giving
non-verbal clues for treasure hunts! H
found the ingredients.
When he was helping me to check out at the till, he made a
mistake and scanned one item in twice.
He immediately said, ‘Why am I so dumb?’
This particular pupil is extremely sensitive to any perceived failure. It can set him off into a negative spiral
where he can end up hitting himself around the head. The tendency towards low resilience is one of
the things I personally find very upsetting in autism. It is very unpleasant to see any child being
so down on themselves for the kind of error that we all make, day in, day out.
I responded that I didn’t think he was dumb, he had made a
mistake and we all make mistakes.
In the car park, I pretended to have lost my car and spotlighted
my own mistake. H immediately had the
idea of using the keys to find the car.
He pressed the keys and I saw the lights flash, so found the car. I spotlighted how H had helped me when I’d
made a mistake – what a good idea it was to use the keys to find the car. On the journey back I spotlighted how good it
was to have a helper with me and how much I enjoyed going shopping with H. I wondered aloud (declarative language) how I
would have managed if I hadn’t had my helper with me. H joked that I would have been walking back
to school and we both had a good laugh about it.
Back at school we made the flapjack together. At one point, H said ‘I love school. I wish I could stay at school all day.’ I thought it was probable that this positive experience-sharing
was prompted by the feelings of competence he had gained when I had been
spotlighting how helpful he was and how much difficulty I would have been in
without him.
I said I thought it was great that he felt like that and
that I had enjoyed my day at school too.
Very, very inspiring! What a great moment to share with your student :)
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this. It is always helpful to learn about other children/teens and how they perceive and deal with challenges. I will be so interested to learn what his level of resilience will be in 6 months time!
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