Life in classrooms and schoolyards is often tough for young people who live with Asperger’s Syndrome. Someone wise once said that children with Asperger’s attract nurturers or predators. In other words, they will draw support from peers, who just intuitively understand their difficulties with social interaction and gently support them, or they will attract unwanted attention of those wanting to set them up or set them off!

 

This 45 minute workshop has the very clear goal to create more nurturers in a class or group. Compassion and understanding are never too far below the surface of even the most seemingly troublesome kids.

 

Based on the work of Carol Gray, this workshop was first planned and trialed with the class of a friend of Bill’s called Jack.  Jack wanted a way to communicate to his peers that living with Asperger’s makes it hard to guess what others know, hard to read from people’s faces how others feel and hard work out what others expect you to do or say in different situations. Jack was desperate for other kids in his class to not take his social mistakes personally and to see that he was a nice person who would get things wrong sometimes.

 

As well as this, Jack also wanted to share his strengths with his peers and invite them to ask him for help with what he was good at.

 

Since the first presentation with Jack, Bill has used this powerful workshop successfully with many young people and their classes to create better understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorders.