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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.
Tone of Voice
- To regulate tone of voice use music and rhythm to modulate.
Practice beating out sounds on a drum. Practice saying one word
loud and soft and rate of speech
- Say phrases with different intonations. For example, using
a tape recorder the adult says a sentence in a normal tone of
voice. Next, the adult models various ways to use intonation
(i.e., fast, slow, irregular, etc.). Have the child mimic your
intonation. This awareness of various intonations can assist
the child with using appropriate prosody.
- Again using music, you can march out patterns and rhythm
- When requesting items, have the child request in a variety
of voices (high, low, angry, sad, etc.)
- Talk about what different tones mean – what does it
sound like to have an angry voice? Happy voice? When would you
use these?
- Have the adult tape record messages (as if leaving a message
on an answering machine). Leave different types of messages
such as urgent voice, don’t worry about calling me back
voice, etc. Have the child guess if this is an urgent message
and / or how the person is feeling.
- Record voices of people the student’s doesn’t
know (find friend, coworkers, etc. and ask them to record)
- Have the student play this game with the student’s friends
during the dyad group. Make cards with happy, angry, and sad
faces on them (these can be simple line drawings). Shuffle the
cards and have one person pick a card without showing it to
the other people. Have this person make a noise that reflects
the emotion. The other person can guess what the emotion is.
This can also be done by acting out a scene, but not using words
– just body language.
- Now that the student recognizes various voices-emotions, take
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.)
- Match voice control to the situation: Draw a thermometer.
Talk about how there are three voices: soft, medium, and loud.
Talk about where it is appropriate to use these voices. Have
the child practice using these voices appropriate (i.e., make
a soft voice – where do we use a soft voice?, Medium voice?
Loud voice?). Put mini thermometer around the room and building
depicting which voice is appropriate to use at which time (i.e.,
play ground is a loud voice). After this activity is completed,
if the child is using an inappropriate voice, point to the picture
of the thermometer depicting the appropriate voice and have
him/her try again.
- Talk about tone of voice. Talk about what the tone sounds like
for various emotions (angry, happy, sad, embarrassed, etc.).
Make nonsense sounds mimicking the tones of voice (the reason
the sounds are nonsense is we don’t want the child to
pick up on the context – just isolate the sound). When
the child understands, reverse the activity and have him make
nonsense sounds that mimic expressions (you might want to use
visual aids such as pictures which mean various emotions or
written words)
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