How to improve autistic children's ability to distinguish objects

When it comes to the cognitive ability of children with autism, many parents will have a headache. Some say, "My child can't learn it no matter what I do?" Some ask, "Why do my children forget this and learn that?" Some ask, "My child can do it, but why can't he do it in real life?" What should I do? Today, I will talk to you about the skills of autistic children to distinguish objects.

After autistic children learn to pair objects, those with good abilities can directly learn to name objects. However, those with weaker abilities, especially those who are just starting to train, must first learn to distinguish objects. This is a necessary stage in naming objects.

Discrimination, as the name implies, is to find the target object from some objects by observing their characteristics. The following are the three key points of training:

1. Choose according to the child’s ability

When identifying objects, whether using pictures or real objects, it is generally practiced by choosing one out of three.

Note: If the child is less capable and cannot choose the item specified in the instructions from the three items, he or she can also start with choosing one from two.

If the child is still not able to do so, you can enlarge the target card or change one or two of them to solid-color cards. The purpose is to reduce the difficulty of identification and highlight the target item you want the child to choose, but the child still needs to learn to identify it.

2. There is only one short-term goal

If you choose "banana, cup, toothbrush" as the three items, the child can only identify one of them in the near future. For example, you can teach the child to identify bananas first. If you ask him to take the toothbrush, the cup, and the banana, the child will be confused.

First choose an object that the child is more familiar with. After teaching one, you can teach the child to identify the second one. When teaching the second one, keep the first one in the teaching.

What is sustained instruction?

It actually means review. When teaching new skills, don’t forget to review the existing skills so that they can be better consolidated.

Therefore, in this three-choice project, after the second one has learned it, then randomly give instructions to the first and second ones to let them identify the three-choice problem. Once they are proficient in it, they can learn to identify the third object.

When teaching children to choose one of three objects to distinguish toothbrushes, what about the first two objects? They should still be put into the maintenance teaching, review, and consolidate. When the third object is also proficient, the three objects can be mixed together for identification. At this time, you can randomly give instructions to let the child choose one of the three objects. After all three target objects are mastered, other objects can be added. As the child's ability improves, you can choose one of five, six, and so on.

Remember: the skills just learned must be put into maintenance teaching to consolidate them. Otherwise, children may forget them quickly.

Learning must include both new skills and review of skills that have been mastered. This combination of new and old allows children to effectively consolidate their existing skills, while reducing the overall difficulty of the course and reducing children's avoidance behavior. Because children can more easily obtain reinforcement during the learning process, they can cooperate more actively.

3. Pay attention to the generalization of instructions

When children learn a new skill, they need to consider how to apply it in their daily life. That is, they need to apply the skills learned in the training to more environments and to their daily life. For example, the skills we learned in individual training classes should also be applied to group classes, families, and daily life. In other words, children should be able to learn to apply the skills they have learned in different environments.

When teaching children to identify objects, generalization of instructions is also necessary from the perspective of generalization. Instructions cannot always remain at the stage of simple nouns, which is also unnatural. As long as the child's ability improves, the instructions we issue should be more lifelike and diversified, and the difficulty can be increased appropriately depending on the child's ability.

In every skill learning, whether it is instruction, imitation, or a certain stage of learning to identify objects, there are steps and it must be done step by step. If the child has difficulty learning at this stage, then review whether the generalization amount of the previous stage is not enough, and then consolidate and strengthen the learning of the previous link before entering the next learning. Don't be impatient. Impatience will not solve the problem, but will only disrupt the pace, so you must move forward steadily step by step.