Postcards From My Mind: Perspectives of Asperger's Syndrome

TEACHING NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION ©Copyright 2002

This article is an excerpt from Educational Consultants of New England, Inc.’s Pragmatic Summer Camp program. The curriculum comes from Alex Michaels’ Theory of Mind lecture.

Posture

1. Make body postures/gestures expressing different emotions. Talk about what the posture means (i.e., shoulder shrug means, “I don’t know” – tense shoulders mean angry, etc.). When the child understands this, have the child act out the postures. Play a game where the adult calls out different postures and the child needs to make a posture with an emotion. Once the child masters this stage, hold a book over your face and make various body postures and ask the child what the postures mean.
2. Cut the heads out of pictures expressing various body postures (such as pictures from magazines). Talk about what the postures mean, give one plausible reason a person could be feeling that emotion, then talk about what another person might say. For example, showing a picture of anger – person’s body is tense and fists are clenched – what does this mean? What can you do/say? Is this the time you should approach another person?
3. Take the game one step further. Now that the child recognizes various voices-emotions, talk about what could you say? 1st step is in a very broad way – if someone is sad, what could you say? 2nd step is to act out various situations and emotions such as playing with a toy and two people want the toy – they’re tugging at it. “What could you say?” (Too many people around and I feel frustrated, etc.)
   

 

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