Sticviews To Assist Autistic Children With Bathroom Wall Decals
At Sticviews, we endeavor to enrich the lives of those around us through art & imagery through our products like bathroom wall decals. Never has this been as important than assisting with the daily tasks of an autistic child. Through our new outreach program, Sticviews is enabling families of autistic kids to become more self-sufficient by printing and applying visual representations of daily chores throughout the house.
At Sticviews we have worked with a leading autism advocate, Carla Graham, to design visual graphics to train autistic children on their bath time routine. We started with some basic pictures of the bathroom area. We then outlined the steps a child performs while preparing, taking, and finishing off a bath. Then we laid it out in a nice simple to read Sticview. We stuck it right in the bath tub using white stic material. The children could follow along the bath steps seeing pictures of each step and the easy to read instructions. The best part is that it works! Both the kids feel more comfortable having the steps right there in the shower to read and the parents are happy that the children are self sufficient and performing their bathing routine.
What follows is an excerpt from a leading expert in the Autism field on the importance of imagery to the Austic child.
By Dr. Temple Grandin
I THINK IN PICTURES. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage.
Visual thinking has enabled me to build entire systems in my imagination. During my career I have designed all kinds of equipment, ranging from corrals for handling cattle on ranches to systems for handling cattle and hogs during veterinary procedures and slaughter. I have worked for many major livestock companies. In fact, one third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in equipment I have designed. Some of the people I’ve worked for don’t even know that their systems were designed by someone with autism. I value my ability to think visually, and I would never want to lose it.
One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills. When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures. I had no idea that my thought processes were different. In fact, I did not realize the full extent of the differences until very recently. At meetings and at work I started asking other people detailed questions about how they accessed information from their memories. From their answers I learned that my visualization skills far exceeded those of most other people.
I credit my visualization abilities with helping me understand the animals I work with. Early in my career I used a camera to help give me the animals’ perspective as they walked through a chute for their veterinary treatment. I would kneel down and take pictures through the chute from the cow’s eye level. Using the photos, I was able to figure out which things scared the cattle, such as shadows and bright spots of sunlight. Back then I used black-and-white film, because twenty years ago scientists believed that cattle lacked color vision. Today, research has shown that cattle can see colors, but the photos provided the unique advantage of seeing the world through a cow’s viewpoint. They helped me figure out why the animals refused to go in one chute but willingly walked through another.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2I5S2FVEuE
