Session 6 Excited Enquirers: Teaching the Language of Joint Attention

The final skill we are going to cover in this course is teaching children the language of Joint Attention.

In its simplest form, joint attention is being able to draw another person’s attention to objects or events for the purpose of sharing experiences. Typically this develops early on when children start to shift gaze between a preferred toy and caregiver in order to share their enjoyment in what they are doing. Later this moves into pointing to show and then children start to use language to gain attention and share enjoyment.

This is generally an area that many children with social communication challenges find difficult and they don’t always develop this naturally. However, it can be taught through play and it is something that once learned, has a huge impact on a child’s social development overall.

Teaching ‘Look!’

One of the simplest ways to teach children to use language to draw your attention to something they enjoy is to teach them to use ‘Look!’

This can be targeted in multiple ways but works best if there are 2 adults present for the initial stages. This ensures that 1 adult can prompt the child and 1 adult can respond.

Step 1: engage the child with an arts and crafts/ construction/ messy play activity that they enjoy.

Step 2: have the 2nd adult position themselves near to the activity, but not participating or engaging.

Step 3: prompt the child to say ‘Look+ name of person’

Step 4: 2nd adult turns around and immediately gives the child lots of attention- commenting on the activity.

This activity works on the same ABC format as other skills you have taught, with the A being the engagement with the child in a shared task, and then the interruption. The B you are looking for here is for the child to say ‘Look +name!’ and the C is that they get instant positive attention from that person. Lots of ‘wow!’ ‘amazing’ or ‘woohoo!’ works too.

Building ‘Look’ into a Back and Forth Games