Acknowledgements
It is very hard to give credit to everyone who should get credit when you have been working in a field for twenty years. I have read and used ideas from so many people! I see a good game demonstrated by a professional or a parent and then I start using it and showing other people how to use it. I am like a bee collecting pollen and honey.
To make acknowledgements even more complicated, I combine ideas so often that I fear my esteemed teachers may not even recognize their original inspiration. Still, I want to acknowledge the brightest lights in my professional journey because their light is reflected in Autism Games.
I could not do this website and the companion blog without ongoing support from my employer, the Scottish Rite Foundation of Duluth. Although this website represents, in part, a kind of personal obsession to document the amazing world of playing with children who have autism, I must acknowledge with gratitude the support provided by my director, Carol Roberts, and my employer as they encouraged me even though I stepped into the world of web creation without any real experience or knowledge about the technical aspects of doing so. I must also say that without the easy tools provided by Google, I could not have succeeded. At the Scottish Rite Clinic, we are now using the website as a regular part of our intervention program for children with ASD but the idea of using the Internet in this way was still another in a series of "new ideas" that my director and employer have supported as I keep trying to find the best means of serving children with autism and their families.
My first and continued most important mentor in the field of autism is Sheila Merzer M.A., Licensed Psychologist. From this gifted woman I learned to love children with autism, see the logic and intent in the behavior of children with autism, and organize my own behavior so that children with autism could see me, understand me, and enjoy being with me.
Many of my all-time favorite games came from her, such as "Pop with..." games, "Bye Bye Emotions" games, "Come to me", and games where we use dolls to represent the family members of a child. I am gradually getting clips of these great Sheila Games posted on this web site and I feel privileged to spread a little of her enormous gift around in this way.
The first article on autism that I read by a Speech and Language Pathologist was by Dr. Barry Prizant and I have followed his work as closely as I was able to ever since. Much of the way I organize my practice and approach communication intervention is based upon his work and the work of his collaborating colleagues. I give credit to this group, and their recent published work in the SCERTS manuals, for the choice and wording of many of my objectives. I highly recommend using the organization of their objectives to track progress in young children over time. Trying to decide which objectives to target with a young nonverbal or echolalic child is quite challenging for any therapist--even one with a good deal of experience. I was so pleased to find the SCERTS system and even more pleased as I have used it with a variety of children over the last two years. On this website, my aim is to eventually have at least one game demonstrated and described to support development toward each specific SCERTS objective--at least for the communication sections. The SCERTS Model; A Comprehensive Educational Approach for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders; Volume IAssessment, scerts.com
The idea of teaching parents specific games to play with their child came from Dr. Steven Gutstein and his intervention program, Relationship Development Intervention (RDI). I credit him for helping me systematically teach the non-verbal communication system (e.g. nodding head, shaking head, shrugging, pointing, crossing arms, following eye gaze, visually referencing) so you can assume that games where I am teaching non-verbal signals are RDI inspired. Also, in games where we "move across space" walking and running and falling together - these are all what I think of as RDI games. I started making video clips of games because of RDI - parents just needed to see what I was talking about to understand it. There are many other aspects of my practice that I attribute to Dr. Gutstein and that are, no doubt reflected in the tips and games on this site. I highly recommend his books and video to families who have a child with ASD.
I read the work of Dr. Stanley Greenspan and his associates often and with appreciation for their insight and clinical ideas. I credit him for many of the ways that I teach pretend play skills to children. I am constantly explaining to parents why it is useful to teach children with autism to "solve real problems with pretend solutions" and this idea for using the imagination as a means for both enjoyment and emotional regulation is one that I first considered by reading the work of Dr. Greenspan. I also came to better understand how I could teach children not just communication and play behaviors but communication and play as a means for developing abstract thinking skills and developing emotional maturity. The complexity of Dr. Greenspan's thinking makes it difficult for me to explain all the ways he has influenced my work, and I am less able to point directly to specific games as Greenspan Games - but his influence is in the way I create games and think about the development of children. It is also true that when I begin working with a young child, I use more structured or scripted games and gradually add more novel elements until eventually, as I play with a child and help the family play with a child, I get to a form of play that looks very much like what I have seen Dr. Greenspan do in his Floortime play.
When I first read Reaching the Young Autistic Child by Sibylle Janert, I wanted to go work beside her. Her insight into early development in children with ASD provided so many Ah hah! moments. She helped me create games around very simple but profoundly motivating ideas. For example, until I read her book, I never understood that many great games are based on putting things into a hole (stop reading here and just think about how many games and activities this includes) which she says is based on the fact that food goes into a hole in our face! A near sure-fire hit of a Joint attention game for mom and child is feeding each other Cherrios! Her book remains one of my favorite because she teaches one how to think about children with ASD by warm, insightful, and often surprising example.
I also want to give my strongest acknowledgment to the many children and families who taught me, activity-by-activity with frankness and clarity, what was actually fun for a child, useful to the family, and what was educational and meaningful over time. I love the details that make up a rich and interesting play session and playing with so many families over the years they have communicated with laughter and tears, blank stares and excited interest, articulate skepticism and contented reflections the important details of playing together with a child who has autism. I can think more clearly about play and communication because I have read and studied some smart thinkers on the subject but I can understand play and communication better because of the families and children that I have played with.
Finally, a warm and heartfelt thank-you to Jonneke Koomen, who knew how to do a proper website and told me what she knew. When this involved the learning of html code, she just did it herself. She edited my run on sentences and in the process managed to give a kind of Brittish wording to the writing here and there--which I think is fun. My dear Jonneke, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!