According to Freeman, (1996, p.34), the “Finding Out” activity is a vital activity to teach our children with autism as most of our children do no the language ability to ask appropriate questions of peers. When they are interested in a peer, they face difficulty in finding the ‘right’ words to form a question.
By teaching social script (i.e., Finding out about someone), the child is given the opportunity to internalize these questions so he or she have the tools to be social in a verbal manner.
This activity is taught concurrently with Simple Word Association and it might be useful for you to read up on the series of activities that we have drilled and mastered before teaching this one.
- How to Teach Social Language Part 1 – Turn-taking
- How to Teach Social Language Part 2 – This is a… I have a…
- How to Teach Social Language Part 3 – Increasing General Knowledge #1, #2, #3
- How to Teach Social Language Part 4 – ‘Before and After’
- How to Teach Social Language Part 5 – using listening
- How to Teach Social Language Part 6 – Simple Word Association
- To build on child’s ability to ask questions
- To build on child’s ability to converse with others
Materials needed (adapted from Teach Me Language and guide provided by C’s therapist):
- Worksheets I have created and laminated:
- Show the child the blank template and say we are going to find out about the child or the teacher. (I told C we are going to find out more about what everyone is the family likes, and slowly moved on to the extended family and his favourite toys.)
- Cross out the word (i.e., eat, read, watch, etc) after the question has been answered.
- Teacher is to help with the writing down of the answers.
- Ask the child to read out the sentences after he or she have asked five questions.
This is quite a fun activity to engage the family. C would laugh at the answers given by B and me, and we would laugh at the answers given by C on behalf of his favourite toys. Sometimes, when C comes up with identical answers, I would prompt him to give me another. I felt that this would be useful to build up his vocabulary bank and ability to come up with more nouns with relevance to the verbs.
Other social language related activities that we have done: