For day two in our list of summer holiday activities grab some chalk, go outside and have some fun 🙂
Pavement Chalking
Aim
To practice and improve early literacy skills
What you will need
- Chalk (variety of colours)
Draw a circle on the floor and practice taking turns jumping into it.
Pavement chalking provides lots of opportunities for practising early literacy skills; try tasks such as joining up two dots with a straight line (left to right) or joining dots to make wavy zig-zag lines etc.
Chalk different shapes onto the ground and encourage your child to jump onto the requested shape after saying ‘ready…steady…go’. Start with only one shape, then add new ones, one at a time. Vary this with activities such as requesting your child to ‘put the bean bag on the square/circle’, etc. To add further receptive language skills, move on to presenting a choice, for example, bean bag, teddy, brick, and chalk further shapes in different sizes and colours. You might then ask your child to ‘Put teddy on the small circle’ or ‘Put bean bag on the yellow triangle’. Continue to use ‘ready…steady…go’ and rewards where necessary (verbal or otherwise). Remember some children with autism really don’t like over-enthusiastic shrill voices. Be aware if this is the case (he/she may actually see this as a reason not to co-operate). Try using bubbles, tickles or treats instead.
As well as chalk, you can also draw on the ground with sand in a plastic bottle with a hole in, or with water in a squirty plastic bottle (those with a sports sipper cap are ideal).
From Playing, Laughing and Learning with Children on the Autism Spectrum by Julia Moor