The Positive Partnerships Autism Training website is full of resources to watch, read, download, print and use to help you support kids on the Autism spectrum whether you’re a parents or an educator. I’d point any teacher or learning support assistant who is about to “Get” their first kid/s on the spectrum to work with in the direction of the online training modules to give them some quick info on ASDs and their characteristics.

Another of the resources I love from the Positive Partnerships site is the planning matrix and other planning tools, that get parents and teachers to consider the many facets of ASDs – such as language skills and sensory processing – and how they relate to and impact on a student’s learning. I know that the Catholic Education Office has adapted this matrix to cater for all their learning support students, and my old workplace in Canberra was developing a version for working with kids with speech and/or language needs, and were presenting workshops on this for local educators.

The page on using evidence to guide decision making is also a wonderful help, given there are SO MANY options out there for support/therapy/treatments etc… I think it’s an important part of supporting parents to be able to support them to access information to select evidence based interventions for their kids, and to help them steer clear of treatments that either do nothing (and are thus a waste of time, energy and money), or worse, are harmful to the child and/or family (such as chelation *shudders*).

Every family I know that has accessed the two-day (free!) parent workshops has found them to be a very positive experience. Marita, a mother of two girls on the spectrum, has written up her experiences of the workshops in two posts here and here :)

Do you have any other links to great online, Autism-specific, resources?