Peer Mediated Intervention for Children with Autism in Typical Settings

This is a summary of Peer Mediated Intervention for children with Autism in typical settings. This has been adapted for the work of Kathy Thiemann-Bourque PhD, CCC-SLP at the University of Kansas and her research with school age children. I have been researching using this intervention with for preschool age children with autism that are verbal. The results have been encouraging thus far. We are implementing the intervention with Head Start classrooms as well as preschool classrooms as a classroom wide intervention. From both my perspective as a Early Childhood Special Education Teacher and the perspective of the Early Childhood Educators that I work with it is changing the climate in classrooms from problem solving to cooperation. Children learn how to enter play with each other, respond to each other, ask for help, give compliments and encouragement and maintain interactions. These are great social skills to teach any preschooler, but by making it visual and focusing on the peer instruction children with autism receive the coaching from their peers which easily generalizes to the classroom versus being taught to socialize with adults and then generalize to peers. I also have lesson plans for each phase of the intervention that I will also make available, and the visuals are created by using Boardmaker so I will post them on www.boardmakershare.com for free.