Teaching Strategies for Autism:  Tools to Help Your Child Succeed

Of all the teaching strategies for autism I've learned, goals may be the most important.

Ever get lost and try to find your way somewhere without a GPS or even without a map?

Goals are a lot like a GPS. They help you know where you are going and they help you get there faster.

Goals give you direction and focus. Because of this, they dramatically increase your ability to succeed at whatever you are doing. This will give your child a huge advantage.

Learn more here about how to write goals that can keep you focused on helping your child succeed.

Sometimes our kids need a hint, a clue, or a reminder when they get stuck during a lesson. How can we help?

Thankfully, there’s an effective technique that works for most if not all children with autism. Find out more here about how you can help your child through just about any lesson while giving them a greater chance of success.

If you read the article at the link just above this section, you learned an important technique for helping your child with just about any lesson. But our kids can often come to rely on that help. That’s why it’s often best to pair that method with the technique I will show you in this article. 

Understanding this concept and applying it during your child’s lessons can help them retain the skills and information they've learned.

Does teaching your child complex or multiple-step tasks seem next-to impossible? Some children have trouble learning a task that involves a series of steps.

Forward chaining can be helpful in teaching many types of skills, such as tying shoes, brushing teeth or doing the laundry. Learn more here about how to teach your child a multi-step task.

As you may know, no one technique works for every child. 

That’s why we sometimes have to try different methods until we find what will help our kids succeed.

If you’ve tried forward chaining to teach your child a multi-step task and it didn’t work, or if trying something else appeals to you, you may want to learn about backward chaining. Learn more here about how backward chaining works.

What can you do if your child isn’t motivated to learn? Or what if they would rather do other things, especially when obsessed with something else?

Thankfully, there are proven, effective ways to motivate our kids to succeed. Check out this article on motivating kids to learn for ideas on how you can make your child want to participate in lessons.

If you read the article at the link just above this section, you learned an effective way to motivate your child to learn.

This article dives deeper into this subject, showing you actual systems for motivating children with autism to learn just about any subject or skill. You can learn more here.

Many children with autism have trouble applying to other situations the new knowledge or skills they have learned. For example, they may learn how to read words from flash cards, but then be unable to read them from a book.

Check out this article on generalization to discover how to help your child apply new knowledge to other situations they may encounter.

You work hard to teach and train your child to learn many things. At some point you'll need to measure their progress. This is where testing and quizzes come in. But how do you go about testing them?  

Learn here about several ways you can measure your child's progress.