Physical Education Routine for Children with Autism Transcript

Coach Dave: Thank you for continuing to watch our workout series of how to help improve the lives of individuals with autism spectrum disorders through exercise. As you can see we're in a gym environment and gym is truly the most unsensory friendly environment in the entire school. Now here it's pretty quiet, but just imagine 30 kids running around, yelling, screaming, objects, foreign objects really, balls, football's, baseball's being thrown around. Our children or adults on the autism spectrum may have no idea what that ball is, how hard or soft it is, and that can be very frightening for them. And then the sounds, the screams, the laughter, the bounces off the backboard, things like that, all have an impact in our children's ability to perform successfully in a gym class. 
So structure is key when you are setting it up if you are paraprofessional, or an adaptive physical educator, or physical educator. We need structure for our children. That's how they will succeed and they will know of what's expected of them each time they enter the gym class. So as I just mentioned it's not just for PE professionals, but para-educators, the individuals helping these children day in and day out and when they come into your environment this gym class they can now help the children guide and navigate through, through the classroom. 

And you can do that with setting up numbers or stations as you see here. Obviously if you've seen throughout our other series we're talking and showing visual support cards or exercise cards from our visual exercise system. Very important.

Timers. Countdown boards or timers can be very important to help your children understand the expectation of how long that they're gonna perform that exercise or that routine. Countdown boards. 

You can use arrows. Arrows can direct them from after station 2, follow the arrow to station 3. 
So all these little things which might seem overwhelming now, once you get in the routine and set the environment it’s gonna it's going to be so much more easier for you as the educator to set up, but most important to help give success for our children and adults. 

And also what we've seen over the years with in the classroom environment or in the gym classroom is this structure this routine could help peer buddies and help these children build relationships. So sometimes our children don't always wanna listen to the teacher, or the coach, or mom, or dad, but their peers can really help to help improve their lives, build those social skills, and ultimately help them build a healthier lifestyle. So again, structure, all these things can help our children succeed in exercise.
 
So if you have questions, if you have comments, if you have structures and routines that you've used with your children, adults, or your students, please let us know. Contact us at the exercise connection. Contact us at NCHPAD. And share this information so we can better help educate our children, our adults, and other professionals across the country. And don't forget challenge autism with exercise. We'll see you next time.