Sesame Street and Autism tools for instrumental activities of daily living
Sesame Street has been a mainstay for children and their parents for decades. We all remember a time when Burt and Ernie, Grover, Elmo and Big Bird were teaching us colours, numbers, letters and how to play and make friends and now our children are in that same place.
Image of Sesame Street characters from left to right: Elmo, Ernie, Burt, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Rosita, Cookie Monster, Grover and Abby.
Children find Sesame Street so engaging and the creators have made a huge effort to be inclusive and engage all children in meaningful education and play. That same philosophy extends to children on the autism spectrum through characters like Julia, a four-year-old girl with ASD and now through Sesame Street & Autism.
Sesame Street & Autism is a national initiative for communities with children ages 2 to 5. The mission of this initiative is to “See Amazing in All Children” through the development of content for those communities in collaboration with parents, people who serve the autism community, and people with autism themselves.
The site, autism.sesamestreet.org provides families with videos for parents and kids, daily routine cards, digital storybooks, articles for adults and special pages for siblings covering topics important to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
One of the areas Sesame Street has focused on is providing interactive daily routine cards that specifically focus on instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) like going to a birthday party and activities of daily living (ADLs) like washing hands. Skills related to tasks we encounter in daily life are critical to independence and to the quality of life for a child with autism.
Here is the list of Daily Routine Cards included in the site:
Trying a new food
Washing hands
Going to the dentist
Getting a haircut
Going to a sporting event
Going to a birthday party
At Lake Ridge, we focus a lot on developing these skills with our clients through behaviour plans based on the principles of applied behaviour analysis (ABA).
References:
