Autism Treatment Center of America Forum

[imlovinit]

Hi guys, I'm currently working with a lovely six year old boy whose main motivation is numbers and letters! He can be very exclusive with his plastic letters and numbers and on the advice of Intensive staff we have cut the amount of these in the room way down to a reasonable amount! This hasn't deterred our young man as he has become more creative with using household objects to spell with - clever boy
However when we bring paper/pencils into the room for various games, all our boy wants to do with them is get us to draw numbers and letters (he is not currently able to write), cut them out and use them to ism with. We are unsure what to do here - we love to use paper etc in a lot of our games but our boy just sees paper and wants us to draw things for him without being interested in anything else, he is really only using us as an ism tool because if he were able to draw his numbers himself, he would be completely exclusive.
Any thoughts?

[BeckyDamgaard]

Hello!

It sounds like you have done great at implementing our feedback! Right now I would limit the paper allowance to say....5 sheets per day. Sweetly explain to him that there are only 5 sheets of paper for the whole day, and once he has used them all then there will be none left. Each time he asks for the paper to make his ism numbers, remind him that you would love to do that for him but that that will mean there will be no paper for other games for the day. Then the choice is his. If he simply wants to ism with it all then so be it. Have a blast giving him control and then joining him. On the other hand, he may think twice about how he wants to use his paper allowance! and decide to vary the way he uses it.

Warm regards,