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K I Al-Ghani, Haitham Al-Ghani
Making friends can be a challenge for all children, but those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can struggle more than most. This collection of ten fully illustrated stories explores friendship issues encountered by children with ASD aged four to eight and looks at how they can be overcome successfully.
Key problem areas are addressed, including sharing, taking turns, being a tattletale, obsessions, winning and losing, jealousy, personal space, tact and diplomacy, and defining friendship. The lively and entertaining stories depersonalise issues, allowing children to see situations from the perspective of others and enabling them to recognise themselves in the characters. This opens the door to discussion, which in turn leads to useful insight and strategies they can practise and implement in the future. Each story has a separate introduction for adults which explains the main strategies within it.
This book will be a valuable resource for all parents and teachers of children with ASD, along with their friends and families, and anybody else looking to help children on the spectrum to understand, make and maintain friendships.
Author, Kay Al-Ghani, is a special educational needs teacher who has worked for more than 30 years in the field of education. She is also the author of the much-loved bestseller, The Red Beast.
Introduction.;
Appendix: Useful books and resources.
"Each chapter starts with an explanation to the adult, parent or carer and raises awareness of some of the common pitfalls. This is then followed by a social story to illustrate how they can be overcome. I enjoyed both aspects of these scenarios for several reasons... it is apparent from the text that her intuitive approach works - she gets the quirks and triggers - in that although you are working on one particular skill, there can be lots of other issues that interfere with the main plan... she reveals parental errors in a kindly manner. We know our mistakes, or some of them at least, and she understands why we made them... she used our children's most common obsessions in the social stories - which is a great short cut for us parents as we don't need to re-write them to fit our children- thank you!... I would recommend this book, although as I already said, it's designed for high functioning and asperger children, many of the social stories are easily adaptable for other children... As a final note it would be remiss of me not to mention the illustrations that accompany the stories which are clear cut, black and white line drawing - perfect for my guys who always (used to) had a hard time with photographs of real people and color pictures. The're a wonderful and useful addition that complement the stories rather than detract form them. It wasn't so long ago that there were whole shelves of books which were off limits because the pictures triggered all kinds of unpleasantness."
- Whitterer on Autism
"Learning About Friendship is an excellent book. My 8 year old son Aiden has high-functioning Autism so this has been perfect for our family. I really appreciated the user-friendly way this book is put together. The social stories included in each chapter were really easy for us to use as-is with our son. It has been so helpful that we actually sent it to school with Aiden for his Aid to use with him as necessary. The stories are easy to understand and deal with stuff that we deal with daily. The illustrations helped to keep Aiden's attention focused on the story. I highly recommend this book to anyone with a kid on the spectrum."
- Tara's View on Books Blog
