The Clubhouse is the Behavioral Intervention Association's (http://www.bia4autism.org) after-school program. Once a week, children between the ages of 5 and 12, who have communication and social challenges, meet and engage in fun activities to practice different social skills. The Explorers focus on skills such as staying with the group, greetings, turn taking, participating independently in activities, and brief exchanges with peers. The Adventurers focus on skills such as initiating and maintaining conversations, perspective taking, and negotiating with peers.
“Save the Planet – Recycle”: We partnered up and worked as a team. We pretended to be a recycling truck and were holding
two pool noodles: 1 partner was in the front, 1 in the back, facing the
partner’s back. The objective was to pick up “garbage” (i.e., plastic bottles),
that needed to be recycled, with the help of the pool noodles and to place them
in garbage cans/bins. When the teams had collected all their garbage, other teams got a turn. We also came up with the idea of a cheering section: The players, who were waiting their turn, had self-made "Save the Planet" signs and came up with different cheers while holding up the signs to motivate the teams.
This game requires a lot of cooperation and will not work if the two partners don't work together. It also teaches how to compromise and negotiate (e.g., figuring out who will be in the front and who will be in the back) as well as being patient with each other. And of course, it's fun!!!
Friendship Passport, Part 1: We decorated a (fake) passport that we will turn into a friendship passport next week. We attached our portraits; added our names and date of birth or age. We also added stickers and our own drawings.
Today was our first spring session. Our theme this time around is "Earth." To warm up, we started with an adapted version of the popular bozo bucket game:
Continent Bozo
Buckets: Buckets representing the continents were spread out. The
player whose turn it was stood behind a line and tried to toss a bean
bag into one of the continent buckets. Each player could try 3 times to hit a
bucket. If the player hit the target, he/she could draw an animal card out of the
bucket. The flashcards were showing animals that live on that particular
continent.
This game addresses not only a variety of social skills such as turn taking and practicing good sportsmanship (e.g., cheering) but also provides great language opportunities such as learning the names of the different continents as well as the names of the animals that live on these continents. It also leads to natural opportunities for peer communication/interaction, e.g., the players can show the animal card they drew out of the bucket to their peers and structured questions can be asked to start a verbal exchange (e.g., "Do you like that animal?" "What is your favorite animal?").
Earth Collage: We all worked together and created a representation of our earth by attaching different collage materials (e.g., maps, pictures of buildings, stickers of animals, plants and people) to a big sheet of contact that was secured to the table with the sticky side up. We loved adding the glitter representing our oceans and deserts.
