Mouth and face games, which are really a larger-than-life version of face-to-face games for babies, are probably the most important "games" to get an autistic child talking and interested in human interaction. They play on each child's instinctive fascination with mouths, eyes, and the emotional expressiveness of faces. Mouths and eyes can open and close, but mouths have insides with tongues that move and are soft and teeth that are hard and firm. Mouths can also make sounds and tones. Eyes can light up and make us feel wonderful, or darken and scare us.
Dialogical games
Remember the early baby games that practiced pure communication and dialogue skills? We don't need words to have a conversation! If we imitate his sounds or movements, the child is likely to respond with joy and repeat them. At that moment we are having a dialogue, a babbling conversation or a movement dialogue!
We want to try to keep as many communication circles going as possible by means of joint mouth and face play, making small sequences to which we can add new elements and always inventing new sounds that could be made.
- Pay attention to your tone of voice: you can make it rise and fall, SLOW and FAST, suddenly slow down or speed up, ....
- Use your body language and tone of voice like a cat to slowly "SLEEP ON" and then suddenly surprise the child in a funny way when he just wasn't expecting it
- Make such funny noises with your mouth or tongue that he MUST look.
- Do it behind him so that he has to turn around.
- Wiggle your tongue, e.g. up and down, from side to side, in your mouth, ... Can you invent 5 more ways?
- Try snorting, pressing your lips together and then letting them 'plop', ...
- Inflate your cheeks ... inflate only ONE cheek and let the child press on it that the air hisses out ... then the other one
- Bare your teeth ... or chatter your teeth 3x and then stop to wait for him to copy it ....
- Pretend that you want to bite his fingers ... or nose ... or ear ... or toes .... And when you do this, do it gently, of course. But do it quietly!!! Often the child finds this very interesting or funny.
For these communication games to be successful, the adult must create a sense of anticipation and excitement, which is often achieved by doing nothing: Simply waiting, our attention focused expectantly on the child, like stretching and stretching an imaginary rubber band (usually about ten times longer than you thought you could), naturally increases the tension. An expectant atmosphere where nothing is happening can create the feeling that "something must be going on," which means the child must be looking at our face to find out: and thus we have eye contact, interest, and engagement!
