Some gestures are used frequently in a lot of songs. For instance, hand claps figure in pattycake, “Open, Shut Them,” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” Once your child is beginning to imitate clapping hands in one of the songs, prompt her to do it in the other songs that use it, too. The more imitation practice and use your child engages in, the better.
Here are some additional activities for developing gesture imitation:
Add facial expressions (smiles, pouts, fake crying, surprised faces) to your sensory social routines. Exaggerate emotions to cue your child to pay attention to your face, and encourage your child to imitate you. Obviously, you can’t physically help your child make a smile or frown, but you can give the expression meaning with your language and actions. You can touch your child’s face as a prompt, however.
For facial imitations, you will need to use exaggerated and somewhat slowed-down movements. For instance, with a balloon or bubbles, get close to your child—on the floor, face to face. Puff your cheeks up really big, and blow slowly and dramatically. This dramatic setup of the game tells your child what is coming and helps your child notice and read your nonverbal communications. However, it also puts your facial actions into your child’s spotlight of attention. As your child comes to know the meaning of the action, pause while making it, model the action for your child, and wait to see if your child will imitate it to request the action. Again, at first, you don’t expect exact imitations. If your child slightly opens his mouth when he sees you making the blowing gesture, that’s terrific!
Two-year-old Amber loves the balloon game. Her mom begins to blow up a balloon, slowly and dramatically, and then takes her mouth off the balloon, looks at Amber, and makes the blowing gesture with big cheeks. She pauses, waiting expectantly to see if Amber will imitate the gesture. Whether Amber imitates or not, Mom says, “Blow balloon,” puffs her cheeks dramatically, makes some blowing sound effects, and blows it again and lets it fly for Amber to chase. In a few days, Amber comes to expect the puffed cheeks and imitates the gesture (approximately) during the expectant waiting pause. In a few more days, she is also saying an approximate version of “Blow.”
Playing face imitation games in front of a big mirror often helps your child learn facial imitations like blowing, raspberries, making a popping sound with your lips, kissy faces, and the like and becomes a very fun activity.
Here are some ideas for using other daily activities to develop face and voice routines:
During diaper changing—when your child is lying in front of you, focused on your face—is a great time to develop silly face and voice routines, like animal faces and calls, alphabet song or number songs, tongue wiggles, and raspberries. Put a kazoo on the changing table, and use it to make silly noises while you change the diaper. This is also a time to buzz a belly, play creepy fingers or peekaboo, and so forth.
Dressing also allows for peekaboo with shirts; sound effects for “stinky shoes, stinky socks, stinky feet” routines; buzzing bellies; “This Little Piggy”; and so on.
Mealtimes also offer times for big face and voice effects—“yum” faces and sounds for delicious foods; “yucky” faces and sounds for food your child rejects; drinking sounds and gestures; eating sounds and gestures; licking something good off a finger; using your tongue on an ice cream or a peanut-buttered carrot. If your child is in a high chair and you are sitting pretty much in front of her, you are in the best possible position for drawing your child’s attention to your face and voice.
Label and react big-time to unexpected events that happen during the day. Use a big “uh-oh” and a startled expression when something falls. Use “oh, no” and a big expression when you build a tower and it falls. Use a big “crash” when cars crash. When your child gets hurt, say, “Owie, you got an owie,” with a big expression as you examine the owie and give comfort. Then put a big, noisy kiss on the owie with a big display of “all better.”
Caution! Imitating facial movements and sounds is a lot harder for young children with autism than imitating actions on objects is. You are likely to see your child imitate your actions on objects before she imitates body and facial movements or songs. Don’t worry about this—it’s the usual way that imitation develops in most young children with ASD. Just keep the various sensory social routines up, adding new ones each week, keeping up the old ones, and sooner or later your child will start to imitate some actions or sounds in them. Don’t forget to expect that your child will imitate these someday. Continue to wait, help your child imitate, and then continue the fun game.
Summary of Step 3
If you have followed along and carried out the preceding activities, you will have found gestures, body movements, and maybe some facial expressions that you are helping your child to imitate during sensory social routines and daily activities. See if you agree with most of the statements in the following checklist. If so, you are now armed with important skills for varying imitation inside toy and social games—knowledge you will use in Step 4. If not, start experimenting during play and caregiving routines until you have found some methods that work for each statement.
Activity Checklist: Am I Helping My Child Imitate Gestures, Body Movements, and Facial Expressions?
____ I have found sensory social routines and songs that make my child smile.
____ My child easily signals me during his or her turn to continue sensory social and song routines.
____ I know at least one gesture or body movement in each sensory social and song routine that I can teach my child to imitate.
____ I know how to add facial expressions and sound effects to sensory social and song routines and daily routines for my child to observe.
____ I know how to pause and wait for my child to imitate the action without my help.
____ I know when to physically help (or prompt) my child to imitate the action.
What about Malik? Mom has a few songs she sings to Malik (“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Open, Shut Them”) every day during dressing, diapering, and bath time. Mom begins singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while opening and closing her fingers during each verse. She decides that this might be a relatively easy gesture for Malik to learn how to imitate. After singing the song in its entirety one time through, she starts the song again and pauses at the end of the first line with her hands open and out in front of her. Mom waits to see if Malik will move his hands in some tendency to imitate hers (lift up his hands, reach his hands toward Mom’s, open and/or close his hands, etc.). He doesn’t do any of these movements, but continues to look at her with great interest. Mom takes her hands and pats her palms against his palms several times. Then she continues the song. When she gets to the end of the song, where the words “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” are repeated, she again lifts her open hands in front of him and waits for him to pat hers. When he does not, she opens his palms and pats them with hers. For the next few days she does this repeatedly, and within a few days Malik reaches his palms to hers when she puts her hands in front of him. Mom is thrilled and pats his palms a couple of times as she sings the line. Over the next few days, he not only reaches to her palm, but also starts to pat. She’s ecstatic that he’s trying on his own to imitate a new gesture, even if it’s not perfect. He is really learning!
Step 4. Imitating and Expanding on Actions
Rationale. Developing variations in the imitative turn-taking games keeps the games interesting and less repetitious for longer periods of time. It supports your child’s longer periods of attention to you. It also teaches your child to use objects in a variety of ways. This expands the number of things your child can do with objects, and replaces repetitive play with flexible and more complex play with toys and social games. Each time your child imitates a new action, it makes future imitation easier and easier for your child and more automatic.
Activity: Add Variations
Once your child easily and consistently imitates a familiar action that you model, you can start e
xpanding the actions so that the initial action or theme doesn’t become boring or repetitive after a few turns for you or your child. Adding a variation often makes the imitation fun and surprising for your child. How will this look? Your first imitative action back and forth two or three times in the play establishes the theme, the main action. After this, you will introduce something new into the imitation—a variation—to keep it interesting and keep the turn going longer. In doing so, you will also teach a different action imitation, making the routine a little more advanced.
Here are some ideas for introducing variations:
Earlier we talked about copying your child’s use of an object to create a turntaking imitation game. Once your child does this easily—copies you copying him—show your child a new, easy, and very interesting action to perform with the object. It might be showing your child how to stomp bubbles you’ve just blown, how to hit an inflated balloon up into the air, how to turn around while playing “Hokey-pokey,” or how to crash a car into a tower of blocks after building them. You model it first, then hand over the object to your child so he can imitate you. If your child doesn’t begin to imitate, then prompt him to imitate you, show enthusiasm for your child’s success, and then let your child play with the object any way he wants to for a minute. Then repeat the whole sequence: modeling Action 1; giving your child the materials to imitate; then taking your turn and modeling Action 2; then giving your child the chance to do Action 2; and cheering or clapping and letting your child have the toy. The reinforcer for your child’s imitation is to have the desired object for a bit without any demands. Of course, your happy cheers are also a big reward.
Variations are often more interesting to your child if they involve simple, but unusual and interesting, actions on objects: sticking a stick into a play dough ball, tapping a shaker with a stick, or putting a ball in the bottom hole of a maze instead of the top. You will teach your child to imitate these new actions in exactly the same way we have discussed before: showing your child while labeling your act, waiting expectantly, prompting if needed, cheering your child for trying to imitate, or helping your child imitate if she doesn’t try and then cheering. Excellent materials for working on theme and variations include play dough, art activities, musical toys, and complex arrays of things (train tracks and cars; sets of blocks; building sets, and pretend play props like glasses, hats, necklaces, bracelets, brush/comb, etc.).
Theme-and-variation imitative play is a great way to introduce new toys or objects for which the child has no set ways of playing, so that everything you model will be new. Materials that don’t work well for teaching new object imitations are those that the child has a very set and repetitive way of handling.
Summary of Step 4
If you have followed along and carried out the preceding activities, you will have developed all of the stages or steps in how to teach different kinds of imitation (verbal, actions with objects, gestures, body movements, facial expressions) to your child in toy play and sensory social routines. You know how to take turns with your child and develop an initial theme for imitating one action, and after several rounds you know how to vary or expand the activity to include other types of imitation that your child can do. If so, you are now armed with important skills for taking turns and teaching during joint activities. If not, start experimenting during play and caregiving routines until you have found some methods that work for each statement.
Activity Checklist: Am I Expanding My Child’s Imitation?
____ I know how to develop a theme during imitation with my child during toy play and sensory social routines.
____ My child can easily imitate at least one kind of action without my help during toy play and sensory social routines.
____ I know how to vary or expand the joint activity to teach other kinds of imitation to my child during toy play and sensory social routines.
____ I know how to create interesting and new spectacles that my child will imitate during toy play and sensory social routines.
____ My child thinks these variations are fun and attempts to imitate actions back.
Step 5. Putting Imitation Games into the Joint Activity Frame
In Chapter 6 we discussed at length the four parts of a joint activity routine: setup, theme, variation, and closing/transition. You can probably see now how well imitation games fit into this framework. You may even have been using this four-part framework already, either intentionally or automatically, as you have been focusing on imitation activities and variations within them.
The play frame that we have been talking about all through this chapter on teaching imitation is the joint activity frame, with a beginning (materials come out), a theme (the first action is imitated), and one or more variations. We have not discussed closings/transitions yet, but ideally the closing is an organized ending, as you have practiced in Chapter 6. In the rest of this book, we continue to suggest ways for you to use the joint activity framework and imitation strategies to teach other kinds of developmental skills to your child. Imitation and turn taking during objectfocused joint activities and sensory social routines, as well as during various caregiving routines, are fundamental processes by which young children learn from others about language, social behavior, and how objects work. If you learn the concepts we have introduced so far, you will already have the most important teaching skills you can have for helping your child move ahead, even if you go no farther than this chapter.
Activity Checklist: Am I Putting Imitation into the Joint
Activity Frame?
____ My imitation activities typically involve a setup period, in which my child and I identify a theme of the activity.
____ We take a few turns sharing the theme by imitating each other in turn or playing it in unison.
____ After a few repetitions, either my child or I typically vary or expand the theme to include additional actions to imitate.
____ When my child’s attention is beginning to wane, or when the routine feels too repetitive, we typically do an organized closing/transition—putting things away, making a clear transition together, or making another choice.
____ I am using the four-part structure of joint activities at least sometimes during meal, dressing/changing/bathing/bedtime, and I see my child beginning to anticipate the steps in more of these routines.
What about Claire? Claire and her grandma have developed several toy games and sensory social routines that include different acts of imitation. One of Claire’s favorite activities is when Grandma imitates her rolling a toy car back and forth on the coffee table. Grandma takes a second car, faces Claire from the other side of the table, and imitates the rolling, saying “zoom, zoom, zoom” as she rolls. Then she pauses. Rolling is the theme of the imitation game, which Claire has set. Claire stops and looks up during Grandma’s pause, and Grandma takes that as a cue and rolls again, which Claire imitates with her own car. Grandma repeats this whole round again. But Grandma can tell that Claire is losing interest in this game, because she’s not responding or participating as energetically as before. Also, this is a skill that Claire performs easily. So Grandma makes a variation. She puts a long wooden block on the coffee table, with one end of it on a stack of books, and she sets her car on the high end and lets it roll down. Claire watches this with great interest and then rolls her car on the table again. Grandma gets her attention, rolls her car down the hill again, pauses, and then prompts Claire to do the same by helping her place her car on top of the block. Claire’s car rolls down, and Grandma cheers. Grandma rolls her car again and then starts to help Claire, but Claire now does it herself, and Grandma cheers again. This is now appealing to Claire, who shifts her focus to this new game, and the two imitate each other for a few more rounds on the hill.
Grandma realizes that she and Claire have built theme and variation in their imitation game. She also notes the number of imitations, including new acts, that Claire is now making; the length of Claire’s attention to the play routine; and t
he number of practice turns (learning opportunities) that Claire experiences. This strategy has allowed Claire’s grandmother to do more teaching in the play than she could have if she had only stayed with the theme. Claire likes the variation described above and has learned to imitate it after a few experiences with it, which Grandma realizes may be necessary to show a new idea and have it become interesting to Claire. If Claire doesn’t like a variation after a few examples, Grandma can go back to the rolling game for a turn or two and then try a different variation—like crashing the cars or rolling them off the coffee table. Grandma understands that the overall goal is to extend the length of the joint activity routine, to have as many back-and-forth imitative exchanges as possible, and to weave in opportunities for varied imitation. Once the cars begin to lose Claire’s interest, or if the game loses its social nature or becomes overly repetitive, Grandma is ready to suggest “all done” and model putting her car in the car box, gesturing for Claire to do the same—a nice ending to this well-done joint activity routine!
Chapter Summary
This chapter has focused on ways to help your child increase his or her imitation of you and others. We began by discussing the importance of your imitating your child—his or her actions and sounds. We then discussed several different types of imitations: imitation of actions on objects (the easiest for most children with ASD), imitation of sounds, imitation of varied actions, and imitation of gestures and facial movements (the hardest for many children with ASD). If you have followed along, you have increased the imitative opportunities your child has throughout the day. We then discussed the importance of adding variations to imitations to keep them from getting too repetitive. We pointed out how well imitation routines fit inside the four-part structure for joint activity routines: setup, theme, variations, and closing/transition. And, finally, we mentioned how imitative joint activity routines can fit into all your child care routines—not just toy or other object play and sensory social routines (including songs), but also meals, different types of caregiving, book routines, and household chores. Each imitation is a learning opportunity, and by embedding these kinds of games throughout all your activities with your child, you can dramatically increase the number of learning opportunities your child has.
An Early Start for Your Child with Autism: Using Everyday Activities to Help Kids Connect, Communicate, and Learn Page 22