Rainy days can be quite challenging for some children with ASD. A rainy day demands a child to stay inside and usually requires a parent or caregiver to entertain them within the confines of an indoor space. To make these days more fun for the children and less stressful for the parents, we came up with some ideas to keep your kiddos entertained.
Good Rainy Day Games for Children with ASD:
1) Play Charades: a child has to pick a card with a word on it and has to act it out without speaking. Playing charades focuses on skills such as perspective taking and reading non-verbal cues.
2) Compliment Tag: a child must give the child who is ‘it’ a compliment before being tagged, otherwise that child is ‘it’! You should give children examples of what compliments are and when it would be appropriate to give them before you start. This is very helpful in encouraging children to learn how to compliment. Children with autism can have a very hard time giving and receiving compliments. By playing this fun game, you can help them practice this skill in an easy and enjoyable way. (Autismteachingstrategies.com)
3) Indoor Bowling: take 10 empty cans from your home and to make it more exciting, you can cover them with colorful construction paper. Create a bowling alley using painters tape. Mark the beginning and end, stack the cans, and you are ready to play! Children can practice turn taking, sharing and dealing with winning and losing.
4) Indoor emotions scavenger hunt: You will need several people to be at home in order for this to work. Here’s how it works: print out an emotions sheet ( emotions sheet – https://mosswoodconnections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Feelings-and-Emotions-Scavenger-Hunt.pdf )
On the sheet, there will be several different emojis. Your child will have to find a character in your home expressing this emotion and check it off the list. You might have to get creative and act it out yourself, or play a small video clip with this emotion. Ask your child why he or she may have felt this way and ask your child if he/she can remember a time that he/she has felt this way. This game is a great way to develop perspective taking, emotional awareness, and social skills.
5) Make Sock Puppets: this is a great indoor activity because it does not require running out to get supplies. Here’s how it works – take some old socks from your closet. You will also need scissors and glue. Use whatever materials you have at home such as ribbon, googly eyes, paper clips, construction paper to enhance your puppets. Get creative!! Once you have collected materials, ask your child to decorate different socks into different characters. Then, you can ask them to act out a play with these puppets. This encourages the child to understand roles and perspectives and to promote good communication and social skills.
References
Emotions Scavenger Hunt. (2019, November 15). Retrieved from https://mosswoodconnections.com/activity/emotions-scavenger-hunt/
Autism Teaching Strategies. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://autismteachingstrategies.com/
