Who
An autistic individual with LD and some complex behaviours of concern, supported 2:1 in Supported Living.
Why?
To support an individual to 1) recognise and share how they are feeling; 2) to choose an activity to help them in this moment.
How?
We created visual emotion cards with pictures of emotions. These were based on a traffic light system (happy, worried, sad/angry). We used a mixture of actual real life faces and emoji/clipart’s to ensure range of faces and emotions for each. This will help with future generalisation of emotions. On the back of each card was a list of strategies and ideas for activities to support them to manage their emotions. These were Introduced by showing the cards and asking them to act out the faces. It was done in this way as the individual loved to role play and found it a fun activity.
The individual was also asked how they thought the people were feeling, which was a more complex task. Initially they were able to identify how they were feeling, but struggled more with the subsequent activity ideas. Staff repeated this daily with them as it was a daily target for staff to practice. All staff were trained to work on this with – respecting the individual’s choice if they decided not to join in.
Staff modelling was also used to demonstrate feelings/emotions, they would also choose strategies to show the individual that everyone has feelings.
If she struggled to think of one or did not want an option from the card – staff would give other ideas.
Progress
After 6 weeks, this individual was consistently able to 1) point to the emotion she was feeling; 2) choose a strategy/activity in response.
Next Steps
To move on to more complex emotional language that captures more intricate feelings.