Topic “Primary (5-11yrs)”  

Key strategies - you may need to come back to these as and when necessary:

Introduce each food item;

Check which ones the child is interested in;

Demonstrate the asking for and getting of an item - e.g. with another member of staff;

Wait - give time for the child to respond or initiate;

Offer a "forced alternative", e.g. "apple or orange?" - swap around the order in which you give the alternatives to check that the child is not just saying the last thing you say;

Make it difficult for the child to communicate by pointing by having the choices close together and out of reach - so if they point you actually don't know which one they pointed to;

Be sensitive to if the child is getting frustrated - think of ways to help them get it right first time - e.g. by reducing the choice down to one item (temporarily).

Using forced alternatives:

Always give the child the thing they said/signed for. If they are having difficulties with this - for example always say the last thing in the alternative, try the following:

Have one of the forced alternatives being something uninteresting (e.g. the piece of paper);

Have the last alternative as something the child doesn't want (if the child always says the last thing);

Give more emphasis to the desired item, e.g. "Banana or paper?", you could also try only signing the desired item. Over time, reduce the difference in emphasis.

Improving clarity

Sometimes the child may say/sign what they want, but you don't feel it is clear enough (perhaps you can understand it in this context but might not be able to in another situation). To try and improve this, you can try:

Saying 'pardon?' or something equivalent;

Look confused and say, for example '(Do you mean) apple or banana?' (saying and signing these) - this will often encourage the child to produce a clearer version;

Simply re-inforce with the clear version, e.g. you say "Oh, banana" (saying and signing it then passing it over);

Try to avoid simply asking the child to repeat after you as there is no communication and it's not a natural way to communicate - by asking the child to repeat you have shown them that you have understood, and so this is now a different repetition activity - it also has the danger that it could reduce the accuracy of what the child originally said or signed as they didn't get a direct result from this.

This activity is about ensuring that the child understands their usual timetable.

Do this activity on a 'normal' day (or at least one that is likely to be normal).

The child should be able to understand the pictures or words you use for the timetable. If not, you should spend some time showing the child the picture symbol word when they are doing the activities in the routine. See also: "Use a visual timetable" on the Commtap site.

If a whole day is too much, you could do this over a part of the day - for example the morning or the afternoon.

Ideally, the child should already be able to construct the timetable for the 'normal' day with minimal prompting.

Making it easier:

Have a set of pictures of ingredients which are appropriate for what you are making, and some other ingredients. Get the children to choose the appropriate ingredients.

Even easier:

Have a set of pictures for the ingredients, and some further pictures which aren't food (e.g. pictures of furniture, clothes). Help the child to choose those which are food items.

Harder:

Get the children to draw and/or write down the ingredients themselves.

On subsequent occasions, you can pretend that you have a really bad memory, and you need the children to help you to remember what to take. If they don't remember everything, you can look a bit confused, and say something like "I'm sure we need to take something else...".

You could also use ideas based on the comments in "Deciding on the ingredients".

If the children are familiar with cooking this item, but they sequenced the pictures for doing the activity incorrectly at the beginning, you don't necessarily have to correct them straight away - you can correct it at the point when it becomes a problem - e.g. if you get to the putting the pizza in the oven bit before you've put the sauce and toppings on (look very confused!).

Sketches for the sequence - these do not need to be accurate at all - they will be useful for this activity no matter what level of drawing ability you have. The children can also help with this.

You can incorporate a number of maths concepts into the activities, for example: "full", "empty", "more", "less", "hot", "cold".

Safety. Clearly you will need to manage any dangerous aspects of the cooking process as appropriate for the children you are working with (e.g. use of knives, the cooker).