People Watch

 

People watch became a favourite program for both Lukas and our tutors.   The idea was conceived from Marshall and Nowicki’s book,  Teaching Your Child the Language of Social Success.   I read this book and decided that it was a perfect program to generalize “Describe”  and “Emotions” programs from our Lovaas based program.  I obviously would NOT do this program until the child had some ability to describe emotions and to just plain old describe!

 

You can do this in a variety of settings.   If you have cabel or a satellite dish,  turn on the soap opera channel!  Press the mute button.   Then give the SD’s while the child watches the TV.    Go to a mall and sit on a bench and watch people  (Christmas time is ESPECIALLY a good time to do this as it is crowded and there are always emotional people standing and walking about.)  Go to a coffee shop and sit next to a window and people watch on the street.  Go to a crowded park.   Go to a walmart or target and sit in the food court area and watch people.    The idea is to 1.)  check to see how the child can read others and 2.) get the child in the habit of watching others.       Now,  be careful.  Once,  Lukas was in the walmart watching shoppers and he shouts, while pointing  “hey, that woman doesn’t like her husband!  She snarled at him!”  The tutor would ask Lukas questions like:

 

  1. How does she/he feel?  How do you know?
  2. Does he/she like him/her standing there/ like his soup/like the coffee lady?  How did you know?
  3. . Does he/she know that person?  (yes, because they are hugging.   No, because even though they are sitting on the same bench,  they are sitting far apart and not facing each other and they don’t say anything.)

 

On online resource that we were able to use was from the Do-To-learn website.   It is a facial expressions

Game.    It doesn’t show just static pictures.  The model moves her head a little (you can freeze it if you need to)

And you can adjust minor details in her face such as raising one eyebrow or snarling her lip, narrowing her eyes, etc.

You can do it to degrees as well.  You can have her glare a LOT or just a little sneer.

http://www.dotolearn.com/games/facialExpressions/face.htm

 

 

The following is the list of Targets we hit with the People Watch Program.

 

 

 

Targets

Introduced

Mastered

1. Sd1 Identify emotions in others 

12/00

1/03/01

2. Sd2 Identify likes and dislikes in others

12/00

2/06/01

3. sd3 Identify TOM (does he or she know him/her etc)

12/00

3/14/01

4. sd4- Sd1 + How did you know?

12/00

1/30/01

5. Sd5:  sd2 + How did you know?

12/00

2/06/01

6. Sd6 : sd3 + How did you know?

12/00

3/10/01

 

 

**notes:  some things that we ended up having to explain to Lukas:  

 

 a crowd is a group of people that may or may not know each other.  Just because a group of people are together, doesn’t mean that they KNOW each other.

 

Also,  just because two people are talking to each other, doesn’t mean that they KNOW each other.

 

WATCH for rote answers to the question “how did you know?”   He would rattle off something like this:

 

“She doesn’t like him because her eyebrows are down and she is frowning.”

 

Only,  he was right.  She didn’t like him but she was actually smiling, rolling her eyes, and shaking her head.  There were times that he “knew” the answer but didn’t want to put forth an effort to explain it.  (ie, our reinforcement wasn’t so hot)