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Developing Critical Learning Skills in Special Needs Children

Classrooms can be a busy place with all the chatter and movement.  It can be difficult for all children to stay focused at times, but it may be particularly challenging for a child with special needs.

Many children with special needs such as Autism or ADD find busy environments over stimulating and they have difficulty filtering out unimportant information so they can focus on instructions and activities that are crucial for their learning. While listening and attending to details are easy for some children, explicit practice is necessary to help others acquire this skill.

Auditory Processing

Auditory processing is the ability to recognize and interpret sounds and words that we hear.  If a child is unable to accurately make sense of the words and sounds around them, they are likely to have difficulty participating in their daily activities, especially in a school setting. Auditory processing difficulties are commonly associated with Autism, Aspergers, PDD, Dyslexia and Developmental delays. Some signs that a child may have challenges with auditory processing are:

• Trouble remembering information that they hear
• Poor listening skills
• Difficulty performing directions with more than one step involved.
• Delayed response time to answer oral questions.
• Language difficulties- confusion of words, syllables, tenses and pronouns.
• Poor reading comprehension and spelling

To help children enhance their auditory processing skills, educators and parents can incorporate activities and games into a childs day.  This will help them to recognize and discriminate sounds and words meaningfully. Playing simple games such as If Youre Wearing... where a child is asked to perform an action (e.g., clapping hands) only if they are wearing a certain colour, is an easy way to help children practice attending to key words in an instruction.

The activity workbook Listen, Look and Do, is an excellent resource to be used in the classroom and is suitable for children K-3.  The reproducible pages provide children with multi-step activities that require them to listen to explicitly presented instructions and follow along.  Teachers will find it helpful to do these short activities at the start of the day or lesson to prepare the children for listening and attending. It is important to practise these skills in a quiet and calm environment so that children can build up their skill level and confidence.  The activities in the book can be easily modified for individual children and also help to develop such skills as memory, sequencing and prepositions.

Michele Kane BA, MT
Programming Director at Kids CAN Centre for Children with Autism & Aspergers
www.kidscancentre.com