How to teach autistic children to imitate?

The ability to imitate is the basic ability to learn. Many of our autistic children initially lack the ability to imitate, and the lack or inadequacy of imitation ability will also affect the improvement of other abilities. Therefore, the ability to imitate is one of the necessary basic abilities of our autistic children, and we cannot ignore it.

Among the imitation ability, the most basic one is action imitation. We summarize the action imitation into the following items:

1. Imitation of body movements

Body movements refer to the movements of the limbs, such as clapping hands, stomping feet, waving, raising hands, and so on. Body movement imitation we can follow these steps:

(1) Attract the child's attention to our side.

(2) Sending imitation instructions to "do this"

(3) Immediately follow the action that the child wants to imitate

(4) The child verbally praises immediately after making it, followed by reinforcements. (If the child does not respond correctly, we give assistance to complete it).

2. Imitation of item operation

Item operation imitation is the action imitation of the operation of the item. For example, turning the cup upside down, beating the drum, etc. The procedure refers to the operation procedure of the body movement imitation.

3. Fine motor imitation

Fine movements refer to the manipulation of the hands, such as different presentations of the fingers, one-handed finger movements and two-handed finger movements designed according to the child's ability.

4. Continuous action imitation

If the child has multiple single movement imitations, we can try to teach the child to imitate multiple consecutive movements, and it can be a simple dance with music.