Play Dough
Play dough, or modeling clay was another excellent tool. If given the chance, Zachary would simply stack it all up in one huge pile...because to him, based on the need for order, "it all belongs together". I let him do that a little and then worked him away from the need to "clump" it all by showing him how to make things he liked... a snowman, a tree, a dog, etc. Providing labels for objects that we made had made it ok to make these objects. There was still that need to then "pile the rest on", however.
I tried to make things fun and different for him, and to show him how to cope with the unexpected, the unusual - the parts that did not seem to belong (at least until they were explained in terms of how they belonged in the whole), etc.
For example, when I made a tree, I had a bunch of branches sticking out of it. Then, I tried to "add apples" to the tree. I told Zachary this was an "apple tree". At first, since to him, the "dots" or "apples" just looked like little round balls on "his branches", he did not want them there. But, I kept adding them on, each time telling him my tree had "another apple", and eventually, he was ok with the fact that I had added these to the tree.
I then put a few apples in a separate spot, on the table, away from the tree and told him these "apples had fallen off". Of course, he resisted that, since apples "all belonged on the tree". So, that was one thing I to work on a little more. Then, I added bananas to the apple tree....or I told him we had a broken branch, and I pulled one off the trunk and place it away from the tree. I added a "sun" and placed it a little further away. Obviously, there were countless things like this that I could do with play dough. The possibilities were endless.
Simple play dough... another fantastic tool... something that could be fun and help maintain interest as I continued to work on Zachary's need to learn how to integrate the parts into the whole.
In picture 1 we were just starting to play with many many colors. To Zachary, if left alone to do as he pleased, he figured all this stuff "belonged together" in one big pile... thus, bringing order to the "stuff". If pieces fell off the pile, he got very very frustrated. I then took some away and asked him to make me a tree with the green. He started doing that. I then added "red dots" to his tree... he tried to remove them... to him, they did not belong there... until I labeled the tree as an "apple tree"... then the red dots were ok. I also had him add a "broken branch" (at first it was just on the "ground" below the tree). Labeling it as a "rotten" branch worked better... that way, it could stay on the tree rather than having to have "fallen down". I also had him add "rotten apples"... in the form of "brown dots"on the tree (in pictures 3 and 4).
So again, it was really all a matter of allowing for the "in between" situation and showing Zachary how all the parts fit together to form a whole. Labeling absolutely everything was key! Labeling allowed Zachary to make things "different" from what he had rigidly put in his mind and allowed me to help him expand his understanding by generalizing these simple concepts to many other situations!