Information about Autism, Asperger Syndrome and Children Succeed Games |
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Children Succeed games have been developed from a lifetime of experience working with children. Let's Talk, a card game designed to improve communication and social language skills, targets specific skill deficits found in autistic children. Autistic children typically have a very difficult time initiating a conversation in an appropriate manner. Instead they may talk about a particular interest, talking more to themselves than to other people. Let's Talk targets their ability to initiate a conversation appropriately by either asking a question or making a comment. It provides them with a topic to talk about. It targets their ability to maintain a conversation and stay on topic. Often autistic children may begin a conversation appropriately only to veer off to talk about their own particular interest. Let's Talk provides children with visual topics in the form of picture cards that they hold throughout their conversations. The picture cards provide children with the visual support they need to stay with a particular topic long enough to ask a number of questions and make a number of comments. Even though children have fun finding card matches and acting on their bonus cards, Let's Talk is highly structured. It follows a predictable pattern and actually structures a child's conversation by giving them the visuals they need to ask questions and make comments. Let's Talk works best when it is played often. Once children learn the routine of the game they become quite adept at completing successful conversations. Later, the skills learned while playing Let's Talk can be generalized to other situations.
Dr. Scott Bellini of the Indiana Resource Center for Autism presents a five step model for teaching social skills. He stresses targeting social skill deficits and providing specific interventions that target the deficits. Dr. Bellini explains that “social skills often need to be taught explicitly to children and adolescents with ASD. Traditional social skills strategies (such as board games about friendships and appropriate classroom behavior) tend to be too subtle for many children with ASD.For instance, a school counselor was frustrated with the progress she was making with a student with autism. She stated that the program was showing positive results with “other kids in the group,” but the student with autism didn't seem to “get it.” Indeed, he was not “getting it!” The reason was quite apparent. The school counselor was attempting to teach the students about the concept of “friendship.” This is acceptable for some children, but for children with ASD it tends to be a too subtle form of instruction. That is, instead of spending countless hours teaching the child about “friendship,” the instruction should have focused on skills the child could use to make and keep friends.”Let's Talk, About Faces and Emotto focus on specific skills and provide the structure and repetition for acquiring appropriate conversation skills and for cueing into facial expressions. The ability to carry on a successful, interactive conversation is absolutely necessary for making and keeping friends as is the ability to accurately read facial expressions. Dr. Bellini's five step model can be seen at www.iidc.indiana.edu/irca/socialleisure/socialskillstraining.html
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Experts agree that autism is a complex disorder manifesting itself in a number of ways including deficiencies in social skills and communication. Experts also agree that children on the autism spectrum, particularly those with Asperger Syndrome and high functioning autism can improve their ability to communicate effectively and improve their social relationships. Because of their profound difficulty with reading body language, facial expressions and understanding the nuances of language, improvement does not come quickly or easily. However, experts also agree that autistic children learn best when their skill deficits are recognized early and specifically targeted and when social skill learning activities are presented in a structured and predictable manner and in a way that can be repeated. Autistic children do not learn well when the approach is haphazard or piecemeal.
Like Let's Talk, About Faces and Emotto target specific skill deficits and provide a fun, yet structured approach to learning to recognize facial expressions and their accompanying emotions. Autistic children have a great deal of difficulty “reading” another person's facial expression and understanding it's underlying feeling. They may talk at length about something of interest to themselves never noticing that the other person is bored or upset. About Faces and Emotto help children to improve eye contact and to become more aware of other people. By recognizing an expression and physically mimicking the expression they learn to label their own feelings as well as the feelings of the person with whom they are talking. About Faces and Emotto provide them with the visual support they need in order to be successful. Both games can be structured to begin at a very limited level working toward greater levels of difficulty. About Faces and Emotto should be played often in order to provide children with the repetition they need to learn the targeted skills. Dr. Ami Klin and Dr. Fred Volkmar of the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, CT provide helpful guidelines for the treatment and intervention of Asperger Syndrome. One of their guidelines states, “The effort to develop the individual's skills with peers in managing social situations should be a priority. This should include topic management, the ability to expand and elaborate on a range of different topics initiated by others, shifting topics, ending topics appropriately and feeling comfortable with a range of topics that are typically discussed by same age peers”. One of the goals of Let's Talk is to meet this very important guideline. The complete set of guidelines set forth by Dr Klin and Dr. Volkmar can be downloaded at 
The following Children Succeed games specifically target the delays found with autism: 
