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Hi there. At our staff meeting yesterday we spent ages discussing a little boy who has challenging behaviour. We came up with various strategies for an IEP but felt that one factor to consider is whether he may not be recognising the facial expressions of the children around him. Does anyone have any experience of this? Can you give us some pointers and info? Thanks

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I have recently attended some training on Autism/Asperger's and ADHD; failure to read facial expressions was covered here - I'm not suggesting he may have Autism/Asperger's, but it may be worth researching/considering.

 

Sue

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It is also one of the symptoms of Dyspraxia. Not being able to read signals e.g. when someone is getting cross or irritated with them.

Sue

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Hi there, you don't mention an age, so this may not be appropriate. With one of our children we played a game where i would pull a face (say an angry face) he would then try to copy it. Using a mirror can help so they can see their own face as well as yours. You have to keep it really fun. It may help. I guess they are all different.

 

Sally

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i got some lovely emotion/facial expression pictures free from sparklebox. i've displayed them at child eye level all the preschool children love looking, copying and talking about them. maybe you could try this and observe reaction.

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Hi Sally and welcome to the forum! My little lovely (and he is lovely) is 4 and has a whole lot of baggage bless him. We just want to understand him as best we can and yes, we will try your idea. Also, following a link here some time ago I found and laminated some fab photos of facial expressions which we are planning on doing some small group work with. Sometimes these children are such an enigma aren't they? Wish I had a magic wand!

Enjoy the forum and keep posting. :o

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The seal resources, 144 photo's of children in various social context showing a variety of facial expressions is very good.

I attended makaton training last night, the difficulty to 'read' emotions was discussed, and Makaton have symbols for emotions. I'm only on lesson one and haven't covered these yet though. Might be worth going on the Makaton site.

 

Peggy

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This sounds like a little boy we had at playgroup last year. We too spent a lot of time using the SEAL resources and talking about emotions. The problem was that he was quite a bright lad and learned to recognise and name the pictures instead. Give him a new set of pictures and he was back to square one! :o

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Are there any other behavioural pointers to make you think it could be dyspraxia ADHD etc

Make sure he has his eye sight checked to rule this out first

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi

I had a child in the setting with autism and i used a bingo board with 12 different simple face emotions and each week we played matching emotions and along side i tried to make the emotions too and soon he began to name and make his own facial expression of sad, happy, angry etc. You could draw small circle with simple faces and a second set for matching. This is a possible way of teaching a child with autism how we feel as generally children with austism find it hard to read our facial expressions.

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Hi

I had a child in the setting with autism and i used a bingo board with 12 different simple face emotions and each week we played matching emotions and along side i tried to make the emotions too and soon he began to name and make his own facial expression of sad, happy, angry etc. You could draw small circle with simple faces and a second set for matching. This is a possible way of teaching a child with autism how we feel as generally children with austism find it hard to read our facial expressions.

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Does he show facial expressions? Could you take photos of him when he makes them in a natural moment? Then you can say the word at the same time he does it? I know that with some it is more difficult.

 

It makes me think of a child I had a couple of years ago. It was like looking through a glass... no expression at all. And the worse part was that the parents (especially his mum) denied the situation, so... after two years... they changed him from school. It was such a pity.

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Wow lots of replies when I wasn't looking! My little chap actually doesn't show anything as severe as described in the last few posts, rather his behaviour is more the problem, and he doesn't seem to show any understanding of what he's done to other children... which made us wonder if he didn't 'read' facial expressions well. We've done lots of ABC obs on him, talked to mum and put him on an IEP now and are waiting for our Area Senco to visit. His keyworker is working through lots of stuff on emotions, building friendships etc which seems to be helping. We are feeling more positive too as we have a 'positive' strategy to work to. So often its being 'consistent' in and out of the setting that makes the difference too.

Thanks for all your great ideas!

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  • 2 months later...
This sounds like a little boy we had at playgroup last year. We too spent a lot of time using the SEAL resources and talking about emotions. The problem was that he was quite a bright lad and learned to recognise and name the pictures instead. Give him a new set of pictures and he was back to square one! :o

Where do these SEAL resources come from? Can you tell me a little bit more about them? They sound useful...

 

Maz

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