Today’s Peaks and Pits

What are Peaks and Pits?

Peaks and Pits are when our autistic participants give the Peak (the best part) and Pit (the worst part) of their day, each time we are together.

I don’t wish to consider our pits as we will forget them in a week, however, we will remember in a week what our peaks of the day were. The peak is the memory we lock in from each day of enjoyment and self-fulfilling accomplishment.

Today our peaks were our two areas of focus, Independent Living Skills, and Job Training. One of our friends said his favorite part of the day was learning the independent living skill lesson of folding blankets. Our other friend today shared that his favorite part of the day was learning how to answer the phone during our job training lesson.

Today we went on a hike at Franklin Canyon Park, proudly reaching over 10,000 steps. Before our hike, we worked on an independent living skill which is folding blankets. We are no experts at folding blankets over here, however, it is something that is necessary in our lives to know how to accomplish. So this is how you teach a group of autistic adults how to fold blankets (successfully 😊).

How we taught Autistic Adults How to Fold a Blanket:

• We first began by laying out our blanket on a flat surface. This means no wrinkles, no folds, or creases in our blanket on the table.
• Then we counted each corner to recognize which corners we had and which ones we were about to grab next.
• We stood up and looked around at each other as we all stretched our arms into a T pose. This helped us to mimic what we were going to do next with our blanket.
• We grabbed two corners of the blanket and stretched it in our T pose position.
• Then, we used our chin to hold onto our blanket to fold each corner together.
• After folding together, we then folded again in half.
• Placing our folded blanket on the table, we then folded it in half once more.

This created the perfect folded square of a blanket and we felt very accomplished being able to do this ourselves today.

Job Training: Phone Calls

Earlier today, we had a job training session that covered phone etiquette. We learned essential skills such as answering calls, knowing our phone numbers, asking for others’ numbers, and handling calls by knowing how to answer and hang up.

This was no easy feat, but it was very fun and exciting to try together for the first time. We are extremely proud of our friends learning and trying their best to communicate with each other by phone. Even though one of our autistic participants is a ‘Speller‘, we were able to do this whole experience together.

Thank you to those who have read this blog. If you are interested in joining any of our activities on our calendar feel free to email joe@stellify.org.