Learn what Autism interventions might be used with your child if you wonder or even worry about how your child’s school supports them.
You may also wonder what your child on the autism spectrum does at school all day.
Find out what support your child gets if they are in a primary (elementary) mainstream school.
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No one knows your child better than you, but they spend much of the day in school.
You obviously want to ensure they are well looked after, that they learn and that their needs are being met.
Having worked in a mainstream school with children with Special Needs, including autism, I can share an insider viewpoint with you and walk you through the support they might be getting while at school.
Although I have lived and worked in several different countries, my recent experience is in the UK, specifically in England, and this is what I will describe this time.
Approaches, interventions, methods, and personnel delivering them vary from country to country. However, with most autism research done in the Western World (especially in English-speaking countries), all the strategies and practices might be similar.
Depending on your child’s needs, they might or might not be in a mainstream school.
Autism can have complex characteristics that will differ from person to person.
Every individual will be assessed separately to ensure they receive the right support.
In this post, I will be talking about the support that a primary (called elementary in the US) mainstream school can offer your child with ASD.
You will learn that your child might be offered speech therapy in addition to tailored learning.
In some cases, they can also access occupational therapy, personalized and adapted resources and spaces, and exclusive one-to-one (one adult working with one child) support.
Child-centred approach
Your school’s support will depend on your child’s individual needs.
In England, children with ASD will often have an education and health care plan (EHCP).
This document will be created by doctors, psychologists, speech therapists, the school, and other professionals involved in your child’s diagnosis and treatment.
It will contain a plan of action and recommendations for services, approaches, or tools to support your child.
Most schools have SENCOs: special teachers or coordinators dedicated to children with special needs.
Their role is to adapt goals, targets, and recommendations from the EHCP into your child’s care and experience in school.
They will establish and coordinate the support your child gets.
This support will include interventions, adapted learning, and special resources for your child.
Interventions are sessions usually outside the classroom focusing on a specific learning goal.
Speech therapy
Your child on the autism spectrum might be getting speech and language therapy interventions.
Very often, autistic children experience problems with communication.
Some might be non-verbal (they don’t speak at all or speak very little). Others might need guidance on how to hold a conversation, take turns speaking, or understand facial expressions and body language.
Speech and language therapy can help autistic people because it can improve their verbal, nonverbal, and social communication.
Speech and language therapy may also involve learning alternative methods of communication. It can be Makaton, a sign language, or PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System), which uses pictures to communicate.
Your child needs to be assessed first to be assigned a specific speech and language intervention.
This is often already established and clear in your child’s EHCP.
If not, then a speech and language therapist might assess your child.
They may come from an outside agency, or a school may have one in-house.
Depending on the type of intervention, it might be delivered by an external speech therapist coming to school to see your child, or a Teaching Assistant will lead the session.
Although some of them are not formally trained, teaching assistants get step-by-step scripts on how to carry out interventions and should be able to do it successfully.
Some examples of speech and language interventions I use with my ASD students are Colorful semantics, Blank Level questioning, and Wellcomm.
Colourful Semantics
Colourful Semantics teaches children about grammar.
It breaks down sentence functions and patterns and teaches your child how to build and understand them.
It has several colour-coded levels. The first four are:
Orange- Who?
Yellow- What doing?
Green- What?
Blue- Where?
Children start with learning about basic sentence construction.
They are shown pictures and have to say who is doing what.
After lots of consistency, practice, and repetition, consecutive levels are introduced, and children will learn to answer where, when and why questions based on a picture.
Blank-Level questioning
Blank-Level questioning also works with images.
It assumes that developmentally children are first able to answer Who? and What? questions (or point to things in the picture) and then move on to the following levels that require more reasoning.
Where? and Why? questions will follow if the child has mastered previous levels. This intervention has four levels: the first one is Naming things.
Level 2 is Describing things – Answering Who? What? Where?
Level 3 focuses on talking about stories and events, and the final, level 4 is about solving problems and answering Why? questions
WellComm
WellComm is another speech and language toolkit I use with children in school.
Based on the scores, it starts with an assessment and then generates recommended activities.
They are all play-based and help children with delayed language skills.
With dolls, teddies and different objects, they learn to talk.
If you want to boost your child’s speech therapy at home, try my 13 ideas to boost your child’s talking and understanding.
Attention
Depending on the child’s needs, some interventions will focus on support with joint attention.
Children with ASD may use fewer gestures to communicate to form joint attention.
Joint attention requires sharing a common focus on something with someone else. It is a base for further communication skills.
Children with ASD are also less likely to spend time in joint engagement.
Attention Autism
A very popular intervention focusing on attention is Attention Autism, or a “Bucket Time” intervention created by Gina Davies.
It has four stages and involves working with toys and sharing activities like craft-making or creating art.
The first stage is the attention grabber, where the person takes toys out from a bucket to get a child’s attention.
The second stage is the attention builder, and the adult demonstrates exciting activity that is supposed to be fun and stimulating.
The next stage is an activity where the adult shows a task (arts, crafts, simple science experiment), and the children are invited to have their turn doing the same.
The last stage is again an activity demonstrated by the adult, and children are then to copy it after they get their kit with resources and supplies.
Each stage might take several weeks or months, depending on your child’s abilities and needs.
After that, they can move on to another stage.
This intervention will most likely be delivered by a teaching assistant or a teacher, and it can be an individual session or a group activity.
Read my post about the Bucket Time overview here, and about its Stage 3 here.
Occupational therapy
Your child might be offered a different form of occupational therapy.
Their teacher or teaching assistant might work with them on their fine motor skills and gross motor skills (read my posts about fine motor skills and gross motor skills).
They will also provide them with activities addressing their sensory needs.
Fine motor skills
By working on their fine motor skills, your child might improve their writing, dressing, undressing, and feeding, or they might help with toilet training if necessary.
The occupational therapist might visit the school to recommend specific activities. However, the teaching assistant will often know how to support your child.
Activities like threading a string through cheerios, cutting, and playing with playdoh support fine motor skills development (see my post with 50 Fine Motor Skills Activities Ideas here).
Gross motor skills
Children on the autism spectrum might also experience problems with gross motor skills like running, jumping, throwing, or catching. Their teacher or teaching assistants will be working on them with your child.
This is usually done through play.
Sensory needs
Your child might also need some calming activities and those that will help them with their sensory needs (see my post about sensory processing here).
One intervention that I know is used in schools is the Sensory Circuit.
It contains a series of calming and alerting exercises.
Through a sequence of different activities like balancing, crawling, bouncing on a yoga ball, swinging, or being given a massage or a weighted blanket, your child will stay alert, organized, and calm.
Adapting the environment
The school will support your child, ensuring the appropriate and suitable environment.
They will have all the aids and resources they may need.
It might be a separate working station, a table, a display wall, a quiet corner, or an additional room they can go to have a quiet time or a break or to carry out an intervention without interruptions.
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Your child may need additional resources that the school will (or at least should) provide, for example, ear defenders if they are sensitive to noise or chewy or fidget toys.
You may want to check out this post to read about different tools for sensory needs.
The teacher or Teaching Assistant will help your child navigate their daily routine. It might be with the help of visual symbols, pictures, sign language, or NOW and NEXT boards.
Academic
And finally, your child wilL get support with their learning.
Depending on their needs, it might involve additional reading, phonics, or maths sessions.
Sometimes their teacher or TA will pre-teach them something before the lesson or give them a differentiated task.
They might have different-looking tasks than their peers, but they will still be on the same topic or learning objective.
I hope this post gave you some insights into what support your autistic child might be getting at school.
And what are your experiences of the support your child receives at school?
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