22 May 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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For some children on the autism spectrum (and other children with developmental needs), learning daily behaviours and routines can be challenging. Brushing teeth, getting dressed, putting shoes on or preparing snacks are all examples of daily independent living skills where children may need extra help.

Some children need help breaking down the parts of the task into smaller chunks and learning step by step. Knowing the steps involved in the task are important. You need to be able to identify the skills your child needs to be able to teach them.

What is Task Analysis?

Task analysis is breaking down a complex task into a sequence of smaller steps with specific instructions and the expected responses.

Let’s take the example of brushing teeth. For many of us this behaviour is so automatic now that we don’t even think about what we’re doing. Imagine though trying to teach this behaviour to someone who has never done this or done this by themselves before. To help you work out how to explain brushing your teeth, you might break it down into the following steps:

Go to the bathroom, then find the sink

Find toothbrush and tooth paste

Squeeze tooth paste onto tooth brush

Brush*

Rinse mouth

Put toothbrush away

Dry hand

*Note teaching children the actual art of brushing teeth, might be a whole separate lesson, with its own sequence of steps to follow.

Performing an action yourself (e.g. brushing your own teeth) or watching someone else do it will help you identify the steps in the behaviour. Try and note as much detail as you can as this can help you later to work out where to start.

So I have my steps identified, what next?

Now to the fun part. After a task analysis is developed the next step is to teach the steps or skills that make up the sequence. In ABA speak we talk about “chaining procedures”. This is the process where the sequence of skills/steps are taught one after the other…building up until the whole behaviour can be performed independently by the child.

Don’t worry! In the next ABACAS Tuesday the team will be talking about how to use chaining techniques at home.  However you don’t have to wait. If you have a particular behaviour that you’d like to teach your child,  why not grab a pen and pencil and see if you can’t start breaking the behaviour down into steps.

Want more help?

Jenny Lin, Program Manager and the team are available for consultation. All you need to do is to call reception on 9274 7062 for further information.

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