A child needs support and assistance to develop the skills that can be useful in their daily life. Different organizations like ‘UNESCO’, ‘Friendship Circle’ and many more offer different volunteers to help children develop their abilities and skills. These organizations work on developing the health of the child as well. As a teacher or a parent, you need to ensure that your child should not face any difficulties in performing day to day activities like brushing their teeth, making their breakfast and many more. There are certain techniques or ways to improve the ability of the child that every parent needs to know.
Breaking a task
A child with a mental or intellectual disability can have a problem memorizing things. You always need to remember that every easy task for you is a series of different small tasks. It can be considered a process. Like if any child needs to learn about brushing their teeth every day, then they need to include several small tasks such as going to the place where the toothbrush is kept, searching for toothpaste, putting the toothpaste on the brush, brushing the upper teeth and then the lower ones and finally rinsing and keeping the toothpaste and the brush on its place. Like this, each task needs to be taught by breaking the tasks into a chain of different small tasks.
Visual guides
Visual teaching is much more effective for children. It is clinically proven that visuals are more useful than textual or oral teaching to the child. As a parent, you can make videos of different tasks, or you can make graphical diagrams and make your child see them every day so that he/she can do those tasks perfectly without any help. Different video clippings, photos and images can be used to enhance the abilities of a child. Different videos where actors are doing the same task can help the child learn about their mistakes and the approach they should take.
Stories and anecdotes
Different stories, mostly social stories, are useful for making the social child memorize and conduct certain tasks or even teaching certain textual lessons. These poems, rather rhymes, can help enhance the child’s behavioural aspects as the steps of certain tasks are connected to the different lines of the rhymes. Even rhyming can also be a good tool for making the child memorize math, history lessons, or many day-to-day activities.
Apps
If your children are in their late teens, you can expose them to different apps on your respective devices. These mobile apps can help children to perform certain activities with ease. These apps can also help schedule a day-to-day work and notify the child at the right time. These apps also notify even the consultation with personal care professionals and doctors.
Board Games
Board games like rolling stones, lego building, Play-Doh and so on effectively improve certain skills such as calculations and sense of shapes. Every child is fond of games, so this needs to be used to improve their social skills and abilities. For the child, the parents need to motivate their child to play the games so that they can improve certain abilities to identify the shapes and numbers in real-life applications. As a parent, you need to buy such games and make kids play, even encourage them to play as long as they like within a regular time limit.
Involvement of parents
As a parent, you have to play a very important part in a child’s life. As a parent, you must communicate with your child and control their frustration and hyper emotions. Apart from that, you also need to play with your child and make the game interesting for the child so that his skills and abilities can grow continuously growing, day by day.
Creating appropriate environment
In countries like South Africa, parents invest in different classrooms and training facilities for the child. Most of them are parents of a child. A parent needs to ensure an appropriate spacious and friendly place so that the child can get a space where he/she can learn comfortably.
Constant mental health consultation
The mental health of a child is a very important aspect. You need to ensure that the mental health of a child should be up to the mark. He/ she should not feel low for anything.
Final Thoughts
Every child has great potential and can make a very important contribution to society. It is essential to keep track of their progress, and always try to consult therapists and professionals teachers so that their abilities can develop at a certain pace.
Resources
8 Important Tips For Working With A Needs Child-
18 Tips to Help Children With Special Needs Thrive While Learning at Home