I often get asked by parents what my approach is for children with Autism that do not communicate verbally and whilst there’s most certainly not a ‘one size fits all’ approach I do have some particular approaches I embed into my SLT programmes.
In upcoming posts I’ll to cover each of the below in more detail, with case studies etc, but for now my toolbox includes:
Intensive Interaction – To gain the trust of the child by demonstrating and respect their behaviours.
Attention Autism – To develop the child’s joint attention skills and learn more about what they are interested in.
TEACCH – To provide a structure for their therapy sessions to begin to work independently
Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) – To, again, develop joint attention skills and begin to provide them with a functional means of initiating communication (starting with asking for stuff they want).
My initial assessment of a nonverbal child with Autism, in addition to liaising closely with familiar adults, is primarily observational; writing down each and every thing the child does (trust me, we’re talking pages and pages of notes that reduce in legibility pretty swiftly, that I’ll spent hours deciphering when writing my report up!) over at least 60-90 minutes; considering how they are currently getting objects and activities that they want and what happens when they don’t.
Following my observation I will use the principles of Intensive Interaction to start to build a rapport with the child, for us to develop in future sessions, and review the current speech and language therapy approaches that have been advised to ensure they are appropriate.