Turning Autistic Repetitive Sentences into Stories! & Setting up to do Anat Baniel (ABM) Practitioner services next month!

Anna keeps talking about certain events - fictitious or real - over and over all day for days, composing 80% of what she spontaneously talks about, and is on her mind that day; everything else is in response to something I - or our other Son-Rise® Program participants - said on another topic. This is a higher functioning autistic trait - they call it "obsession" or "compulsion" - it's like having a song tune stuck in your head all day and so strongly if effectively blocks out all other topics and learning.  Anat Baniel Method helps by giving the child direct physical experiences that have new variations built in and feel great and go directly to the brain to stimulate change, but in the mean time, Son-Rise also does wonders for it, only directly cognitively.  

Anna's most recent haircut April 2017.

I recognized I wanted to open up my daughter's receptiveness to the more recent, outward experiences (see another post I plan to put up next about the nature of autism being trapped in an inward loop) to create new experiences she can talk about something new and current and real, otherwise she retells stories from Arthur, the Simpsons, and other shows over and over - although she is starting - after years of my suggesting - to create her own stories mixing together cartoon story lines and characters from various shows she watches.

I'm always looking to teach her skills she could get paid for, and writing stories is one I've been asking her to do for years, since she's an excellent illustrator and loves cartoon stories by others. I realized this morning she was telling a STORY, and it would be useful to go from a self-limiting repetitive verbalization to a real story in many ways. I quickly created another spiral curriculum book, "Anna's Stories".

 

I helped her with this first story a lot but she was enjoying it and her "learning switch" (an Anat Baniel Method term) was "on" for sure! I plan to guide her to write her repetitive story line she's obsessed with into stories which she could illustrate, thereby feeling happy and working diligently at practicing story construction, sentence structure, verb tenses, clauses, punctuation, giving context, sequencing events, describing things, etc - all things we're working on right now. An opportunity seized! Try it with your autistic child!

I run a Son-Rise® Program and am an Anat Baniel Method® Practitioner (as of May 2017). Message if you want to discuss! I'm going to start doing home visits to work with autistic kids using similar techniques!