Gina from The Autism Helper explains why visual discrimination skills matter before teaching academics to autistic children. She walks through four types of matching activities, from object-to-object to picture-to-picture, with dollar-store materials and errorless learning strategies. These foundational skills support later classroom tasks like following directions and note-taking.
Hi everyone, this is Gina from The Autism Helper. I'm here to exclaim from the rooftops the importance of basic learner skills. These are the skills that come before any academic type skills such as letters, numbers, colors, and I know in school that's kind of what we mainly focus at, especially when you're getting your degree. I honestly didn't even know about these skills, um, until after I became a special education teacher and started working with Sasha and following her. I had no idea these skills even existed, and they important. Many times we just want to skip right to the learning and numbers and everything, but if these kiddos don't have these basic learner skills, they're not going to be as fluent with learning more skills in the classroom. These basic learner skills can be found in the ABLES, or the Assessment of Basic Language and Language Learning Skills. You might also be familiar with the term the VB-MAPP. Both of these are wonderful. All of Sasha's curriculums and activities are based off— she literally took the information from these books and applied it and created products off of them, which are fantastic. So I always know when my kids are working with, um, those curriculums and these tasks, I know they're getting what they need, those basic skills. So for a Part 1 series, we're going to look at visual discrimination skills or visual performance skills, and I found that a lot of kids lack these skills which then infects them later on in the classroom following directions, matching, um, later on in life when they do note-taking, you know, being able to look at something and discriminate and match it and, and take notes. So it really goes a long way. But I want to show you how you can set your parents up for success at home virtually and how you can do this in the classroom, things that you already have or ways to create it very, very in an inexpensive way. So the first task is matching objects to objects. There's 2 more that come before, like with form puzzle boxes, but we're gonna kind of skip ahead. This is B3 in ABLES. So when you're doing objects to objects, you want to make sure that you have some different ones. I've got a goat, a rooster, and a duck. And at first you might have to start with even less objects. This may be too much for your student. You might have to do errorless where you literally just show matching one-to-one. But if you're not, if you're up to this level or if you work up to it, you want to show them, um, the objects. And the object is to match this goat with this goat. That's it. Okay, and that may seem easy to us, but for a kiddo just learning, this could be really difficult. So just keep that in mind when you're practicing object to object. You can buy two sets of things at the dollar store, or maybe you have silverware in your home that you can match the spoon to the spoon. You don't necessarily have to go out and buy things. I always recommend using preferred objects. That'll increase engagement and motivation in learning and generalizing language skills as well. If the kiddo is really into animals, then they'll learn these sounds and these animals first as opposed to maybe matching silverware. So that's object to objects. The next one is Objects to Pictures. Now this one's a little bit more advanced. I want to show you this one first. These are language cards that I had in the classroom. These are a little bit more expensive probably. They're from Lakeshore. You could go to the Dollar Tree and buy just regular picture cards there, or you can take your own pictures of things and then have them printed off at Walgreens for super cheap. That's another option for parents. Just go around your house and take pictures of preferred items and then print them off and print off 2 sets. So for example, we have a pair of pants, corn, and a frying pan. So the student has to match the object to the correct picture. Now this isn't the best example because these are— they're pretty identical, but they're not perfectly identical. And you usually want to start with that. So that's why I was saying take pictures of things because then you know you've got the right object in the right picture. But irregardless, corn goes to corn. Okay, that's matching objects to pictures. And then this game was from Lakeshore Language Lotto. I love it so much. It comes with all the materials that you see on the mat and they're categorized. And then you just teach your student or kiddo to match identical to identical. And then you can expand this so much more, so many opportunities. We eat, eat, eat the cookie. The cookie is round. Big cookie, little cookie, corn. All kinds of things you can do with this, but that's just from Objects to Pictures. And then next we have Identical Pictures to Pictures. I have this little cute bear game. Again, if you print off those pictures from things in your home and you make 2 sets, then you can use those 2 as well. Or if you had 2 sets of these games or 2 sets of flashcards from the Dollar Tree, you can use those. But this is just matching now a picture object, or excuse me, a picture to the right picture. It's just in the shape of a bear right here. So you would show how no, no, yes, or match. Okay, so that is pictures to pictures. And then you do pictures to objects. So maybe you have frying pan, corn, cookie, and I give you the picture of the corn, matching corn to corn. So that's a way you can do all those type of visual discrimination performance activities. They are awesome. I also love to expand while I'm reading with my kids. And you can teach your parents at home. Maybe they have a set of animals and they have one of these animal books or first word books, and you teach them how to go through the book with their child. Sheep! Baa! And then they match sheep to sheep. So that's just another idea. Cow. So again, these aren't identical. So when you— after you get the first ones that are identical mastered, you can start getting into non-identical. And it doesn't mean you can't expose your kids while you're playing around with these, but just, just a note. And then I'll also be sharing with you guys, Autism Helper has this in digital format, which is fantastic. So I'll be showing you that next. I hope that's helpful. Happy matching, guys.
