Teachers who understand that special interests are a symptom of Asperger’s Disorder will be able to have the patience needed to manage the questions, interruptions, and lectures they are bound to experience.
To help with excessive talk and questions, teachers can:
• Set a specific time, the same time each day, that he can talk about his special interest.
• Interrupt talk about special interests with a reminder of when he can talk about it.
• Prompt the class that each child may ask a designated number of questions.
• Announce that extra questions can be written down to ask during free time.
• Time to talk about, read, or use the Internet to learn about his special interest can be used as reinforcement for completion of other assignments.
Your child’s teacher may appreciate your input on ways to help your child incorporate his special interest into his lessons.
Some suggestions teachers can use to help with resistance to doing work unrelated to the special interest include:
• Set the expectation that all assignments, even outside her interest, are to be completed.
• Allow the interest to be incorporated into some assignments (e.g., selecting a book for a book report, choosing a science experiment, writing about the interest on a grammar and punctuation lesson).
• Incorporate the interest into as many lessons as possible (e.g., count the insects, write a story about insects, draw an insect after each spelling word).
• Use his interest to incorporate several subjects at a time. An interest in clocks can include the history of the clock, what was occurring in the world when the clock was invented, how different countries make clocks, which cultures use clocks and which do not, how many more clocks are sold in Japan than the USA.
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