In a beautiful and poignant article, a mother describes her autistic son’s ‘relationship’ with Siri – Apple’s personal assistant.
Siri is ‘someone’ who can answer her all her son’s questions with the patience and preciseness that an autistic child needs.
This article, together with the recent BMW advertising campaign in South Africa, made me realise that it is the perfect tool for teaching questions.
BMW South Africa – Why?
Toddler questions can be annoying. Often we don’t know the real answers to the innocent questions they ask. But even when we do, our answers don’t slow the pace of their relentless questions. That’s because we’ve misunderstood their language and think that when they ask “why?” they mean the same thing we mean when we ask why. I addressed some ways to facilitate language development from questions in my post. “Did you know?“
Children with language – learning disabilities often find the subtleties of different question formats difficult to master. This impacts on their comprehension skills later on.
Creating real life learning opportunities to practice different questions requires creativity and this sometimes extends beyond the scope of a therapy room session.
Inspired by the article, I addressed different the meanings of different question words with children. The students then had to think of different questions to ask Siri. But, because Siri ‘learns’ to recognize individual preferences over time, she didn’t always understand the different children’s voices. This could be a great opportunity to extend the activity to written language when working with older children.
For the younger children, it was important that they enunciated clearly, using correct sentence structure. The results were hilarious when Siri misunderstood them and came up with an inappropriate answer.
It was a great social skills/pragmatics lesson too!
(Notice how the peers correct the grammar that the child is using.)
Unfortunely, Siri doesn’t know where anything is in South Africa, so she can’t answer where questions.
Perhaps I will need to get a BMW to add to my therapy toolbox. 😉
