How do you get your autistic child to give you his daily feedback...

[Soumia]

Dear mums

While my autistic daughter in yeaf 1 has just statted talking recently in 2-3 word sentenced...I am working very hard on her speech snd sentence structure....

I am.also...somehow encouraging her to narrate and describe/tell me what happened during her day...

Not easy with her poor speech and communication but I do try to work hard on that as I worry a lot about the future...and issues of bullying..etc..

How do you get your autistic daughter/son gives you feedback about his daily school...etc..activities?

One of the strategies may be would be to give her my daily feedback...what I have been doing with her little brother while she was at school all day...sometkmes showing her videos...

What do you think..

Plz advise me

You would really struggle to get any child in Year one to to narrate and describe/tell me what happened during her day.... I do think you are asking too much of her. All children of that age live very much in the present. They might remember if something very unusual or exciting happened, but not many will be able to tell you 'First we did X, then Y happened then we went out to play then we did A and then B arrived and we did C' etc etc.

If you feel it will help her speech to be able to recount some of what has happened, then a home school diary would help that, if there is a member of staff who could make time to write it out. Does she have any LSA hours ?

Thanks for ur message.

Is LSA same as TA ?

By feedback.I mean just telling me what she had for lunch...if school day was good (thump up)? Or bad? Or Okkay ?
With who she played? With who she sat in the cantine?...etc...

I didnt mean a detailed step by step feedback..

Home school diary is a wonderful.idea....i will look into it...

Do you mean a page.per.day diary whete we include picture of her doing a certain activity with a small text description ...etc??

Sorry, yes, LSA = Learning Support Assistant. Often someone would be called LAS if there to support a particular child / particular dc, and a TA (Teaching Assistant) tends to be there as an assistant to the teacher, to support the class in whatever way the teacher asks). Not always though, depends on the school.

So what I was asking was, is there someone whose job it is specifically to support her, who might therefore reasonably be expected to make time to do a h/s diary, as opposed to the class TA who won't have time.

People use them differently, depending on the child's needs and difficulties, and on the amount of support they get. Not that many use a page per day and add pictures due to not many having enough hours of support , but yes, aiming towards that type of thing.

So you know though, none of my neurotypically developing dc would have given me that sort of feedback on their day.

When ours were little (one with ASD, one NT) we started doing a "round" at dinner every evening: everyone took turns to say one good thing, one bad thing and one more good thing that had happened to them that day. It gave us a structure which helped DC1 to open up and conversation flowed better from there. It sounds a bit artificial but it worked for us.

Wow...you inspired me...this is a great idea..mi will keep it in mind to do it once mh kids are a bit older...thx

We used to do something similar in a diary at bedtime (not every day!!) One good thing, one bad thing and one new thing (she was anxious about new things so.we were showing her they could be OK or even fun). We used to draw a picture of one of the things for her which she really loved. Now she sometimes draws her own pictures or writes what she has done.

Also, do you have a timetable for the day? I find it helps if you ask something specific like "what did you do in PE" or "did you do spellings today" rather than "tell me about your day"...

Avoid asking anything for the first couple of hours. Give her time to process first. And yes, don't expect much from a Y1. I know plenty of NT 10 year olds who will tell their parents nothing except "it was fine".

To encourage DS to talk about his feelings, I explained to him that I was very interested in what he thought, what he liked and disliked. This was a real surprise to him! It is hard for him to understand that we don't automatically know what he is thinking. Then we set up a special time when he talks and I listen. He chose a name for it, let's say "Ben's talking time". If he was looking stressy after school, I'd say we would have Ben's Talking Time later. After a while he would start asking for it when he had something to say.

He would not tell me what he had for dinner or what he did in PE, but he would tell me what was important to him - issues in the playground, that kind of thing.

It sounds to me that this might be a step too far for your daughter at the moment - she can only say things she can say. I think for now, focussing on something she is excited about and wants to talk about is probably more productive than trying to ask her what she is learning in maths or what she had for lunch. I did signing with my DD and she had no interest in "useful" signs like "more" and "milk", she just wanted to sign animal names. So that's what we did. Maybe ask her teacher what she enjoys most in school and ask her about that when she does it. A home school book is a great idea but you will probably have to live without knowing who she sat next to in the canteen etc.

I think you are expecting too much too. Autistic children find it very difficult to transfer, so what they did at school stays at school.(This is why homework causes so many difficulties for autistic children too.)

We used to have a home school diary, and this worked well because our son had a 1:1 TA who used to religiously update the book every day.

And in my experience, if you ask most children what they have done at school, they invariably say , "Nothing," or "I can't remember."