First year at Tamaki Primary - Lego Club

The first year at Tamaki Primary Satellite, it was apparent early on that these students had limited skills with playing. The 6 boys found it really hard to share, take turns and play with anyone. Even parallel play often ended in uproar! So we went back to basics and worked on these skills regularly within the class programme. 

LEGO is an amazing resource to use with autistic children so after lots of researching, the class Occupational Therapist and I came up with Lego Club. We created the rules around what we wanted to achieve and made sure it was included at least weekly into the timetable. 

The rules were read before every session and I observed the students based on these rules eg respond positively to the leader, share the pieces and break up their creation after each go. The leader was asked to choose what everyone had to make from a selection of black and white pictures, but it didn't have to match the picture so there were allowed to be creative. The students were encouraged to comment positively on one creation, then they had to be broken up and a new leader was chosen. 

It took a LOOONG time to have a LEGO session that was free of melt downs and outbursts!! By the end of the year, I had managed to create a group of students who responded positively to a leader, to breaking up their creations and to someone using the piece they wanted.