Anticipation…
Anti-c-paaa-tion. It’s making me wait….
Some may know where this comes from, and others may not. It is from a ketchup commercial from a long while ago.
It is about the waiting. And how hard the waiting can be.
And for many of our kids, the waiting can create anxiety and restlessness. And then the question is how do we TEACH the concept of time– How do we take the ethereal thing like time and make it concrete and workable for our kids.
Wow, even I am impressed with that question.
The truth is, I can only speak to what we do with our young adult with special needs, my daughter, Elizabeth. She is 27 years old now and has quite a busy schedule.
One that involves packing lunches, bags, texting people, reading other peoples’ texts when they arrive.
In other words, there is a lot of TIMELY things to manage in her world.
And for Elizabeth, this can still prove to be challenging.
We have tried many things from timers that look like clocks and the color goes away as the time for it to go off gets closer.
She did not like this at all. She almost hated the bell that rang and startled her.
So goodbye to those timers.
We tried setting Alexa timers. But once set, there really is no indication that they ARE set, so it is like nothing is going on and then BAM, Alexa is beeping and talking and for Elizabeth, there was no transition time. Just GET GOING NOW!
She did not like this one either and once she was so frustrated she grabbed Alexa, pulled her cord our and said “ How do you like that Alexa?”
It got to the point that I decided to be her timer
I would call her on the phone, yell up the steps and pretty much interfere with her calm times
She did not like this at all and quite truthfully, neither did I
So in the vein of the saying teach a man to fish
Here is what we are doing now:
We have found timer that are a bit like a stop watch
We have timers that are portable.
They have numbers on them that go up to 90 minutes. There is a beep to signal the end that she likes.
Together, we work on setting the timer. We build in 10 minutes of “get ready” time which she is aware of.
We look at an analog clock, as we set the timer, to count by 5’s from the time it is until the “get ready” time. The she physically sets it.
So far, success!
She needs the visual, she is helping to set it, in charge of putting it near her and following it when it goes off.
She does not get startled and she has a few minutes to transition.
I hated that before she would watch the timer, here she looks at it but for the most part, she is working well with it.
Time may never be a concept she loves but we have worked hard to get to this point where she is working with it, not against it.
Hope your month is a good one,
Michele