Visual Support
Visual Supports are offered to families to support communication, behaviour and emotional regulation using the PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) principals in a functional setting. Services are offered to parents and teachers to help set up the visuals at home and school.
Strategies include:
- Weekly visual schedules
- Daily mini schedules
- First Then charts
- Cue cards
- Finished cue cards
- Choice Cards
- Use of iPAD apps. programs to support scheduling
- Transition supports
- Visual mapping to support narrative and social emotional development
- Design of Lanyards to encourage appropriate behaviours
- Visualising and Verbalising to support language comprehension
- Video Modelling to support social pragmatic language development
Video Modelling:
The science behind the effectiveness of video modelling is strong. In numerous studies, comprising decades of scientific research, video modelling has been shown to be the most effective method for teaching social skills and target behaviours to children with autism.
Target Behaviours and Skills
Research on children with autism has shown that video modelling can be very effective in improving the following skills and target behaviours:
- social interaction behaviours
- academic and functional skills
- communication skills
- daily living skills
- play skills
- social initiations
- perception of emotion
- spontaneous requesting
- perspective taking
Video modelling can teach target behaviours very quickly compared to other methods, and the behaviour is said to be “generalized,” (i.e., the child is able to exhibit the behaviour in real-life situations that are similar to the research scenario). At the same time, video modelling has been proven to decrease certain problem behaviours, including aggression, tantrums and other off-task activities.