Many parents and professionals struggle with how to teach kids with autism how to dress
themselves, how to shower, how to wash their hands, how to clean up for meals.
So today I want to talk about how I learned through this book, Activity Schedules for
Children with Autism, and how you can create little books to make self care and other skills
a lot easier to teach.
Hi, I'm Dr Mary Barbera, autism mom, board certified behavior analyst and bestselling
author of The Verbal Behavior Approach: How to Teach Children with Autism and Related
Disorders, which is now available in over a dozen languages.
Each week, I provide you with some of my ideas about turning autism around so if you haven't
subscribed to my YouTube channel you can do that now.
So I have done some video blogs in the past on things like shoe tying, um, which you can
check out.
I haven't done a whole lot of videos though about how I taught Lucas and how how I taught
other clients how to dress themselves, how to wash their hands, how to use utensils and
all kinds of self care and daily activities that often get in the way.
I didn't say it in this video introduction, but in addition to being a behavior analyst
and an autism mom, I'm also a registered nurse and in the past as when I was a practicing
registered nurse, um, on a medical surgical unit in a rehab setting, I always worked with
neurologically impaired patients who oftentimes had strokes or head injuries or brain tumors
and they had to learn or relearn, I should say, to talk, to walk, to toilet train, to
use utensils.
And so a lot of my self care practices that I now disseminate through my online courses
and community are based a lot on my nursing background.
I have a couple of examples that I want to talk to you about.
So one time I was in a verbal behavior classroom and uh, it was early on, so this is probably
2004, 2005.
And um, I was in a few classes and I went to this one class and it was an older child
life skills course class.
So not everybody, all the students in there had autism.
In fact, a lot of those students didn't have autism.
They had other disorders like down syndrome.
And I remember, um, we were talking about, you know, this 14 year old girl with down
syndrome and the teacher was kind of upset because here we are going in and some of the
other consultants were using words like, you know, the discriminative stimulus or the mands
and tacts and, and this, these things were not in this 14 year olds IEP.
And so the teacher was getting really upset.
She was an older woman and she looked at me the one day and she goes, I don't, that's
not in her IEP.
I don't, um not that she didn't care, but she just felt like we weren't working on the
things that she wanted to work on.
So I said to her, okay, so what do you want to work on?
And she'd say, well, in her IEP there is uh, a goal for her to set the table.
Okay, we can work on that because ABA is the science of changing socially significant behavior.
Setting the table for a 14 year old with down syndrome is a more than appropriate goal.
We can do that.
So I helped the teacher and I said, okay, let's talk about setting the table.
Does she set, can she do any parts of the table?
And she was a little iffy on that.
And I said, okay, so now we have to decide how we want her to set the table before we
just try to teach her.
So do we want her to carry all 4 plates over at a time?
Do we want her to gather the 4 plates and the utensils put them on top of the plate
and carry it over?
And she looked at me, she was, I have no idea.
I'm like, okay, well let's decide.
And then let's teach her the steps of setting the table.
So everything can be broken down and everything, especially when you're talking about self
care, um, leisure activities, vocational tasks and chores are chained procedures that don't
involve, shouldn't involve a lot of talking.
It should involve a shaping and chaining and reinforcement so that the child is eventually
doing it on their own, which are different techniques than what we teach.
Um, what I teach within my book for instance, is all really language development except
for chapter 11, which talks about potty training and hand-washing.
And in that chapter I do talk about a task analysis of writing the steps down to something.
Another example is when we went to teach Lucas how to use knives and forks, so how to cut
like a chicken tender up.
And so we, because I'm his mom, the behavior analyst that was working on this goal came
to me and said, okay, we want to teach Lucas how to, um, cut up his chicken.
How do you cut up your chicken?
How does his brother cut up chicken and, and then how does this therapist cut up chicken?
And it was amazing.
There were like some people went through the tongs, some people turn their fork over and
cut like that.
Some people kept their fork, you know, and cut like that.
It was amazing.
So we need to break down the skill into a task analysis.
In my book in chapter 11, I break down the steps of hand-washing for instance.
And really another pivotal point in my, um, journey with Lucas and trying to teach him
some of these skills.
Um, was I read this book, which is a very old book.
You could see it's very tattered in the front.
And also I'm going to show you this, Lucas used to when he was little scribble on things
if you left them alone for a minute.
So I wanted to show you that, that, that no longer happens.
But you know, I know people struggle with that.
Okay.
So this book was written in 1999 so it's 2 decades old, but it is a very good book by
McClanahan and Krantz.
And it basically shows you how to set up, uh, activity schedules.
I also went on to create little books for Lucas.
This is his morning book.
He still uses this book even though he knows the routine.
Um, this helps if there's me versus my husband versus another paid worker here that it is
Lucas’s not routine.
Not the way I would do something.
Or, um, my husband would do something.
So it just basically goes through the steps.
Take your medicine, get out your Turkey bacon, um, get your water out, put the bacon in the
microwave for 2 minutes and see this is really helpful.
Eat, clean up, sweep the floor, wipe off the counter, sweep the floor.
Like he, he does that.
And so, um, in fact we had a how to do wash book and when my younger son Spencer was going
to college, he's like, where's the Lucas's little wash washing machine book?
Because you know, this can help anybody.
It can help you teach kids, learn to learn to make a sandwich or to learn a whole routine.
So for Lucas, we put whole routines in here.
We have a bedtime routine, when he gets a shower, he turned, it's like, so this picture,
uh, it causes him to turn on the shower and then he, he flips the book and then he sits
on the toilet.
He flosses his teeth, he brushes his teeth, he, um, shaves.
So all of these techniques really help.
And so if you want to learn how to make these, these little books, um, better, I would recommend
this book.
We also put a fitness routine so you can do like 10 minutes on the treadmill, then lifting
weights, whatever you want, you can put in little books.
And this, this has really helped with um, Lucas's independence and um, he is very familiar
as we teach him new routines.
Um, if he gets a job, say, uh, as a janitor someday we can break down the tasks and we
have in terms of like how to clean the bathroom or how to um, clean off the counter.
Um, it's just a matter of breaking down the steps.
And if you are gonna use any kind of language, um, make sure you use, for each step, 5 words
or less.
And make that language consistent.
I do show that in that shoe tying video that is on my YouTube channel as well.
I break down the task into 5 words or less for each step, and then I fade out that language
eventually too.
So hopefully you've enjoyed this short little video blog on how to increase self care with
these little books.
If you liked it, share it, give me a thumbs up, leave a comment, and if you'd like more
information about joining my online courses and community where we can really help you
help your child or clients get to the next level and reach their fullest potential, you
can attend a free online workshop at marybarbera.com/workshop and I hope to see you right here next week.