People like to succeed. Perhaps especially kids: Being too small, too young, to inexperienced, too weak, and too uninformed for a LOT of stuff, it’s rather nice to be good at stuff.
Hence: The “What? How on earth did you KNOW that? – game”!
Hannah isn’t a native English speaker. But at three, she liked words. Any way a word would have presented itself to her, she would have learned it. However, I still invented this game since english words were not generally available around her, and I didn’t want to “teach” her stuff – that would be boring…
We sat at a table. I asked her stuff, in english:
What colour is this? And pointed at something red.
Then, theatrically, as if we were in on a conspiration together, this invisible playmate-me and her, I whispered really loudly:”red!”
Changing the position and the voice to make it clear that this was not the same figure in the game as the one who had asked the question.
Hannah replied “Red!!!”. Then, I had to make a great show out of being overwhelmed by surprise. What? You know colors in english? How can that be? You are only thre years old! Now I’m gonna give you a question you can NOT answer! What color is this?”
…and each time her little collaborator bent forward to let her know the answers. She was thrilled! Knowing grown up stuff, fooling her mum, winning every time. This was great!
Hannah lerant her colors and heps of other stuff. Of course, she simultaneously learnt about trickery. About what they call theory of mind: the ability to reason about wht other people know and don’t know.
Quite obviously the “questionasker” I played, had no idea she was cheating, and she knew this, and knew I knew it, but it still worked, since it is a game. A fun game. Not all ASD-kids will understand how this game is played, but if they do, it is very rewarding to have the right answers to all questions!
This is also how we teached maths: By making her know the huge numbers long before she should be able to calculate them. But thats will be in a later section!
