Floortime Strategies to Promote Development in Children and Teens: A User's Guide to the Dir(r) Model: A User’s Guide to the DIR® Model

I love this book, it's filled a big gap. The ideas for floortime activities are clearly written. They have been thought out by someone with a lot of experience and knowledge. Ideas for using play and our children's natural interests to help them develop their skills are the main themes. There are bite-sized activities to help develop skills in all the main areas, including attention, self-awareness and empathy. Highly recommended.

I really like this book

There are lots of approachs and interventions in the field of autism and that tends to be common in all of them is that the information about them is often difficult to access unless you pay to go on expensive courses. I have been to a number of forums where people (autistic adults included) have said to parents “Do Floortime, it’s really good”, but all the big information on it is hidden away in courses that many parents just aren’t going to be able to afford.This book is almost the ultimate beginner's guide to Floortime - and I would be confident that most people would be able to implement at least some Floortime practices into their day-to-day life after reading it.The book starts with an introduction to Floortime and the history of the intervention and then moves straight into the main principles; it discusses how the focus is on being part of the child’s world and interests, and how these can be used to scaffold their growth.The bulk of the content is on the different Capacities within the Floortime Strategy, which are all about different approaches and strategies to use to build on current relationships between the autistic person and someone else. I like how each section gives concrete examples for different stages of development – which means that regardless of the expressive and receptive language of the individual, different strategies can be used.This is not a book to be read cover to cover in one go (which is what I had to do to review it), but one to work through or to take bits out of to build relationships with the people in your life. Whilst the focus is on relationships with children and teens with developmental disorders – a lot of it can be generalised or adapted for use with other people as well.