Category Archives: Play

Welcoming the 2018 Special Olympics USA National Games to Seattle!

This week, over 4,000 athletes and coaches traveled from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia to compete in events at the 2018 Special Olympics USA National Games, hosted in Seattle, WA. After beginning on July 1st, the USA National Games are now on the fourth day of events.

Founded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in 1968, the first International Special Olympics Summer Games were held in Chicago. The Games hosted about 1,000 athletes in more than 200 events. Now, 50 years later, the Special Olympics boasts over 5.3 million athletes from 170 countries. The Special Olympics exists to provide year-round sports training and competition for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, while also continuing their opportunities to develop physical fitness, gain courage, experience joy, and to share their skills with their families, teammates, and communities.

The Special Olympics USA National Games, part of the Special Olympics Movement, hope to use the joy of sports and competition as a catalyst to create social change and to promote a more inclusive community. In May of 2015, the local Special Olympics Washington was awarded the bid to host the 4th quadrennial USA National Games. Of the 4,000 athletes competing in this year’s USA National Games, more than 300 of them are represented by Special Olympics Washington – the largest delegation among state programs.

The University of Washington (UW), along with Seattle University and Seattle Pacific University, is proudly hosting events on its campus, including Powerlifting, Track & Field, and Tennis. This year, staff from the UW Center on Human Development and Disability (CHDD), where UW’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC), University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Education, Research, and Service (UCEDD), and Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) programs are based, happily came out to support the athletes and teams at several events as volunteers.

Jen Gerdts, PhD, UW LEND Director, attended Day 2 of the events

As “Fans in the Stands” volunteers, CHDD staff, including members of the UW Bernier Lab and UW LEND, cheered on the various competing teams, helping to foster a positive and competitive atmosphere for the events and athletes. Announcers politely asked spectators to refrain from booing and yelling, but heavily encouraged them to scream with excitement for all players.

For CHDD staff, volunteering as “Fans in the Stands” was a fun way to support the hardworking athletes during the Special Olympics. Staff, interns, and directors alike all watched excitedly and clapped alongside fans from Minnesota and Florida during the flag football game, and chanted along with the team from Minnesota after their loss, helping to keep spirits high. They also had the opportunity to support the WA women’s basketball team from the local Special Olympics branch and their competitors from the Texas women’s team. Overall, the USA National Games in Seattle are shaping up to be an exciting week of events!

Members of the UW Bernier Lab at CHDD are excited to support the Seattle Games!

 

Written by: Daniel Cho, Research Assistant

ASD-friendly Seattle-area museums and family destinations

Here in the Seattle area, many travel-associated businesses and organizations and tourist destinations are deliberately ASD-friendly, with special accommodations for light, noise, and volume of visitors. Here are a few programs that exist and destinations to put on your list:

***please note that inclusion/exclusion does not imply any endorsement or relationship between our lab and these organizations

Journeying and Sightseeing for Travelers with Autism

The idea of travel can bring up feelings of excitement, apprehension, fear, curiosity, anxiety, and happiness for individuals with autism and their family members and caregivers.

This recent article describes how “travel can be […] onerous for people on the spectrum — but it can be especially enriching, too.” The author nicely highlights both challenges and rewards of traveling and also mentions many great programs and resources to help individuals with autism feel more comfortable while traveling and sightseeing, as well as companies that specifically work with travelers with ASD and other special needs and sensitivities.

How the world is changing for travelers with Autism

An overhead shot of a long-lens camera, a Field Notes Notebook, a pencil and a travel bag laid out on a map

 

Solar Eclipse! Tips for watching and preparing your child for the eclipse

Solar Eclipse! Tips for watching and preparing your child for the eclipse

By Kira Hamer and Emily Fox

On August 21st, 2017 we will have an amazing opportunity to see an almost complete solar eclipse. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. While we aren’t directly in the path of the eclipse (you have to go to Oregon for that), we will experience almost total darkness at 10:30am when the moon passes in front of the sun! Many of us might find this experience and the science behind it incredibly exciting, but for some individuals, this event could be confusing, a little frightening, and disrupting to our routines. In this blog post, our team offers some suggestions for how to prepare yourself and your child for the eclipse, as well as some fun activities to do in the Seattle area while it is happening!

Here is a social story to help prepare your child for the Solar Eclipse: I am going to see a solar eclipse

Here is what the eclipse will look like in Seattle: http://bit.ly/2uC1FlT

Facts about the solar eclipse: http://bit.ly/2tm5aKK

How to Protect Your Eyes during the Eclipse

First and foremost: looking directly at the sun without special eye protection can cause serious damage, so always protect your family’s eyes with solar glasses if you want to directly observe the eclipse. According to space.com, there are four companies that meet NASA standards for solar glasses. These are Rainbow Symphony, American Paper Optics, Thousand Oaks Optical, and TSE 17. Your local library may also offer free eclipse glasses! It is important to note that sunglasses are not a replacement for special viewing glasses. If you are unable to find special glasses, another way to view the eclipse safely is to build a pinhole camera. A pinhole camera projects sunlight through a small hole in a box onto the other side of the box, so that you aren’t looking directly at the sun. You can find instructions for building a pinhole camera here.

How to Prepare Your Child for the Eclipse

Like any new experience or change for a child, it can be helpful to practice what you might do the day of the eclipse or to talk about what might happen. Here are some tips to help you and your child prepare:

  • Introduce your child to the solar eclipse using a social story. You can find an example attached. It may be helpful to read the social story several times a few days in advance of the eclipse.
  • Use a stopwatch or a timer to help your child know how much time is left in the eclipse. In most locations, the total eclipse will likely last 2-3 minutes.
  • If you are using solar glasses, help your child practice wearing these glasses so that they can get used to how they feel on their face.
  • Make sure you and your child are wearing sunscreen if you will be outside!
  • If you are worried that being outside during the eclipse will be frightening for your child, watch the eclipse in a different way! NASA will be live-streaming the event, and your child may be more comfortable watching the eclipse inside at home.
  • During the eclipse, the temperature will drop significantly and rapidly. If your family will be outside, plan on bringing an extra coat or a blanket.
  • The sudden darkness during the day will likely create increased traffic. It may be helpful to either plan on staying home for the duration of the eclipse or to get to your viewing spot early. If your child has to attend camp or a school program on the day of the eclipse, you may need to warn them that the drive could be longer or you might have to drive on a different route.
  • Make the experience fun! Color pictures of the sun and the moon, get a book from the library about space and the planets, or take photos of your family on the day of the eclipse. Help your child understand that this is a special and exciting day in science.

Fun Eclipse Activities

The eclipse is a great opportunity to help your kids become real scientists! NASA is asking people in the viewing area to report on what they see and experience. The GLOBE (Global Learning Observations to Benefit the Environment) Observer Eclipse App can be downloaded on your phone, and guides you through how to make observations. NASA is hoping to have a million eclipse viewers contribute their findings!

Autism and Play: Imitative play

Continuing with the theme of Autism and Play, we want to explore different types of play that can help children with autism.  Imitative Play, as outlined in Michele Solis’ article titled ‘Imitative play improves symptoms of autism’ in Spectrum News, can increase a child’s social responsiveness.

Imitative play was found to increase social responsiveness, including eye contact and verbalization, in children with autism. Children are encouraged to build on their natural interests, incorporating play with learning in a way that holds the child’s attention and motivation.

Autism and Play: Part I

Through play, children with autism can hone thinking skills

In May 2016, Raphael Bernier, PhD, wrote an article in Spectrum News about play and autism.  Below summarizes the article, and you can find the full version by clicking this link!

Play provides some of a child’s first opportunities to rehearse social interactions, generate novel ideas, toy with symbolism and develop narratives — skills that serve us later in life, particularly in our highly social world. For children with autism, however, these opportunities do not present themselves so easily. Yet play is still an important developmental tool for these children.

Many children with autism show unusual features in their play starting early in life. These include reduced creativity and imagination, such as recreating scenarios from a television show verbatim. The play of children with autism also tends to have a persistent sensorimotor or ritualistic quality.  In assessing children with autism, clinicians look at several different types of play, including symbolic play and functional play. Children with autism are often typical in their functional and sensorimotor play at age 3, but they show poorer pretend play skills than their typical peers do.

Cognitive abilities, language skills and executive functions such as self-control and mental flexibility all influence the development of play and its application to clinical settings. Autism affects all these domains.  Many children with autism are missing out on the opportunities and benefits of pretend play.

The relationship between executive function, language and pretend play provides new avenues for treatment. Developing therapies to improve executive function, for example, can help children with autism benefit from pretend play, which creates natural learning opportunities for a prepared mind.  Pretend play itself can be considered a form of treatment — one that costs nothing, requires no professional training and can happen anywhere.

https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/viewpoint/through-play-children-with-autism-can-hone-thinking-skills/

We will continue to explore Autism and Play, so stay tuned for more posts on this fun, informative topic! ~The Bernier Lab