Autism and hobbies and interests

Here is a rough guide how parents and teachers and other guardians can help children with autism use their special interests.

Subjects: Art, science, music, craft, maths

Skills: Drawing, creating, writing, making, numbers

Knowledge: Birds, pictures, tunes, plants, patterns

Encourage the child to work on related activities to do with their interest. Eg if it is music, they can draw instruments, write their own tunes, write a guide, photograph things. Go to places of interest and learn about music. Join groups of same interest. Play the music instruments.

All these can help the child to socialise and not be alone all the time. They can also learn more and get educated. It could later on become a career.

So, what about me? Well, I liked writing stories at school. English, as it was known then, was my favourite lesson despite being bullied. And look what I do know – I am an author writing for adults and children.

This is a brief guide to a full book I have planned to write about hobbies and interests for children with autism, as part of the Rainbow School guide series and 'Learn about autism'.

Retreat Part 2 - What I learnt

This is part two where I talk about what I learnt at the retreat. There are three different ways I learnt: about plot, about one of my characters in Charlie and about myself.

I didn't learn that much about plot, but what I did learn was that you can write a book in verse instead of prose, the traditional way. Eg Robert Paul Weston's first book is in rhyming verse. You can do it as diary format, either by journal, blog or text. This was in Elizabeth Wein's second talk during the weekend. We did exercises, and it was doing one of these where we had to write the first scene in the pov of another character that I learned a bit more about Charlie's little sister, Wendy. I learned that she cared about him, which doesn't come across in what I had already written. So I am going to add a scene where Charlie faints and sees her looking at him concerned.

So that is what I learnt about plot and one of my characters. About myself: I learnt that although I'm an Aspie, if I want to find out something from someone or connect with someone for a reason, then I will go and do it. After I had the one-to-one with the agent, who suggested I try writing to niche publishers, I remembered that a couple of the others were primary teachers. Would they know about reading matter for special needs children? I approached one of them, Zoe Boyd-Clack, whom I recalled was a primary teacher, and she kindly phoned her brother, whose partner works with special needs children to ask about what books they read, to find out which publisher the books are by. I have yet to hear, but I do hope I do. So, that is what I mean by when I want to do something, I do it.

If I hear any news about that, I will let you know. It was a great weekend. I got a lot of writing done (more on that in the next post), made contacts and got ideas on where to send my Asperkids series to.