The building that houses the Curtainbox's office was originally part of an orphanage complex built about a century ago. The office features some fantastic sections of exposed, decaying brick; a high, vaulted ceiling; and an old freight elevator. However, the building is not insulated or air conditioned except for two window units, which means that my autism class yesterday was brutally hot. Because of this, the students were particularly unfocused, and either very antsy or tired. Even one of our most high-functioning students (the playwright from a few weeks ago), kept asking if we could have naptime. Despite this, we did manage to be somewhat productive. We reintroduced the sound ball game to the kids, and successfully managed to teach them to attach a sound to the imaginary ball.
The culmination of the class is a showcase where student pairs perform scenes that they come up with, and today we divided the class up into pairs and had them determine a plot for their scenes. The pair that I was working with had some difficulty at first coming up with an original scene (one of the students kept suggesting Veggie Tales plotlines), but they eventually decided to write a scene about two friends at a sleepover who make a prank call to someone asking for help. After realizing that they may have actually scared the person they called, the two friends call the person back to let them know they were just kidding.
After this, we had the students do an exercise where they were split into pairs again and given an open scene like this:
A: How are you today?
B: I am feeling a little sad.
A: Why?
The students then had to fill in a line describing something that makes them feel sad (there were scenes with different emotions too). This was to help students to apply an event to an emotion and to help them recognize and express those emotions, since, as I’ve mentioned, this is difficult for many autistic individuals. The exercise wasn’t hugely successful, as one student couldn’t stop laughing when he was supposed to be sad, and all the students playing A had difficulty responding to the emotion (for example, sympathy towards someone who is sad) but hopefully more practice will improve this.
Kathleen
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