Sunday 26 January 2014

Dinosaur Numeracy

Our youngest son is not enjoying school life at the moment. He keeps telling us he is fed up of learning and sitting down. Naturally he is an active boy who wants to play rough and tumble, be outside and do lots of sensory activities. This weekend we have done mini circuit training like I do at bootcamp and he has loved doing the bear crawl, squats, crab walk, push ups and star jumps etc. However, although this is very important and forms part of his sensory diet, which is an essential part of him being able to cope with daily life, we also need to encourage him to learn so that he can enjoy different aspects of life and have a chance to reach his full potential. 

One way to help a child with ASD is to harness their learning to their passions/obsessions. One of our son's interests is dinosaurs and we have lots of them at home ranging from plastic ones, to glow in the dark, puppets, stretchy and talking dinosaurs. He also loves numbers and so today I have incorporated the two activities by using a dinosaur stamp to make basic sums. 





It is simple and easy to do and to our son it is a fun way to learn numeracy. He is a visual learner so being able to see the dinosaurs to count them encourages him to do a task he might not normally enjoy. 

My homework for this week is to learn the dinosaurs by name so that I can create a dinosaur alphabet! 

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