Make Play R.O.C.K. - Book: Take Out The Toys

This is the second book in the Make Play R.O.C.K™ series for parents of young children with Autism and other social communication difficulties.

This resource focuses on expanding "functional play" ability, which is early play involving conventional or expected actions using toys such as shape sorting, building block towers etc. These skills provide a foundation for the formulation of all later skills so it is important to optimise these as early as possible. Play for children who have Autism or other developmental challenges may not be as advanced as other children their age, however if specific research-based intervention strategies are used during everyday play activity, there is a significant amount that can be done to build skill levels.

Content and strategies include:

• Understanding how early toy play develops and how play of children with ASD differs from typically developing children
• Learning powerful intervention techniques to engage children
• Identifying stages of early toy play so that the next functional play steps can be planned and supported
• Use research-based strategies to help children learn to imitate
• Enabling children to transfer new learned skills to a variety of toys and play partners
• Examples and illustrations of parents using Take out the Toys strategies to build their child's play skills
• A checklist for identifying your play style, underpinned with understanding of how this affects learning opportunities
• A checklist for identifying a child's stage of early toy play and the next step that he can take
• A Toy Play Plan to help you plan your child's next play step and how you will support this

Other books in this series - "Plan for People Play" (55711) and "Put Pretending into your Child's Play" (55713)

Paperback

"I've just sat and read the Make Play ROCK book in one go. It's very accessible and is a great reminder about how to use Hanen techniques in play situations. The examples are realistic, they sound just like children I work with, and there are lots of game ideas to build interaction skills. I will definitely be recommending this book to my clients, it succinctly sums up the strategies needed to build interaction skills and explains why gees strategies and skills are so important for communication."

Beth Atkinson, Speech and Language Therapist, Chatter Independent Speech Therapy