Engagement Is The Key

The groundwork for the following topics has been laid over the past couple of years. Last year the girls learnt the definition and distinguish between carnivore, herbivore and omnivore, and could place animals into groups, who lived in different environments. However they were not massively interested in the topic and as I could see they were not retaining knowledge beyond the basic facts I shelved the topic. It is so important that children stay interested in a topic, especially if they are autistic. I have observed that forcing a subject will only cause them to completely switch off. So we stepped back and moved on to another topic at the time. Consequently habitats, living things and food chains were on the goal list for this academic year. The girls seem to be full of surprises this year and after unexpectedly having a win with the topic of magnets I let them scroll through their science educational playlist to choose their next topic. They chose habitats! They were really engaged and we had a great time dancing along to Jack Hartmann’s music. This interest snowballed incorporate all three topics I wanted to cover within this area.

Habitat, Habitat, Is Our Home

‘A habitat is an animal’s home, which gives it a place to live, food and water. So a savannah will have lions and it’s food will be there, like gazelles. We can’t live in someone else’s habitats. We can’t live under water because we have lungs and need air from trees. Lungs don’t work under water. Fish live in water and have gills so they can breathe under water. We can’t move through trees because we don’t have a long tail, so monkeys live there. We can’t live in the sky because we don’t have wings, so birds live there’

Jack Hartmann’s video on Habitats is fun, informative, with a catchy tune which will get in everyone’s head, but it is a great video to clap your hands and dance to with your children. Hartmann is a children’s presenter who is specifically trained to work with and relate to autistic children in particular, and his educational channel is truly amazing. He takes the children from preschool, learning the seasons and the months of the year, right up to year two at least in maths, English, science and Spanish. He’s easy to watch from a parent’s perspective, he’s very engaging and my children really respond to him and sing his songs around the house. He promotes movement and dancing and exercising whilst you learn, which is great when you have hyperactive children who do not respond to learning sat a desk.

What makes us alive?

‘We breathe through our lungs, and our heart beeps. We move around and have babies. We eat, poop, drink and grow. We respond when someone tickles us. A toy doesn’t do any those things so it’s not alive. If our heart stops beeping we are no longer alive. Also the sun gives us energy and gives us food.’

Food chains

‘The sun is the energy which makes the plants and vegetables grow, so the herbivore can eat them, and then the carnivore eats the herbivore. The sun produced the trees the stegosaurus ate, and then the T-Rex ate the stegosaurus for dinner. In the savannah, the sun provides the grass for the zebras, so the lions then can eat them. On a farm the sun provides the grass, so the cows can eat the grass and we can get their milk and then eat the cows.’

The girls now know these topics at a simplistic level, and yet it is far more advanced than their knowledge a year ago. Moving ahead slow and steady, using repetition and building upon foundations are useful tools to produce a solid outcome. Do the girls need to learn more than this basic knowledge? Not at this time, they know the formula which they then applied to their existing knowledge. I did not give them the food chain examples, they deduced them from former knowledge. They provided a chain with extinct animals, wild animals and one including humans in it. That to me shows comprehension of the basic concept.

This was all taught verbally and visually, they did not show an interest in using art to cement the knowledge. They learnt what they needed to and are ready to move on. The topic of magnets took half an hour, these three took a week to gain the accepted level of knowledge. Let us now embrace the topic of light. Learn and move forward, review and remind, but forever move forward. This is how my girls learn best. The autistic mind can be confusing and mind boggling at times, but it’s beautiful to watch develop. Strip away the fancy frills, the unnecessary filler and get to the core skills or root knowledge, and move forward. I’m providing the pieces of knowledge a little at a time and they are showing me that they don’t need me to show them how to link the pieces. They are putting the puzzle together themselves as the years go by. At the age of four Kira can make the link that we can’t naturally live and have a habitat on Venus due to the fact trees don’t grow there, and therefore we can’t breathe on that planet. Sophia thanks and hugs trees and has a deep appreciation for nature because she realises that the oxygen we breathe in through the lungs, which is then carried around the body in the red cells is provided by trees, and she links that within the sun’s energy. She sees cycles in all that we learn and loves piecing it together for the larger picture.

Another learning tool I have learnt teaching autistic children is patience. If I sit them down and demand a test or an answer on the spot, I’ll be greeted with blank faces, a shrug of the shoulders. You would be left genuinely questioning yourself if you have actually taught them anything, that they don’t actually know what a tree is, let alone the oxygen cycle. You instead plant seeds, nuggets, ask a question randomly and then sit and wait. Eventually they will come and you have to be ready for the outpouring of information you’re likely to receive, either verbally or within pictures, and I have no doubt in time it will be in written form. Teaching these children is an education for me, and I’m loving the journey.