Over the years I have worked with maybe as many as a hundred children with autism. Each child with autism is a challenge, but so is any child. It is also rewarding, although it can be a lot of hard work.

I cannot claim to be an expert on autism. There are many, many people with more expertise than I have, although over the years I have learned a few useful tips and had some success thankfully. I cannot possibly write everything that I know here but hope that some of my experiences will be of some small use.

One problem that people with autism suffer is that often they are "labelled", which is grossly unfair. The autistic spectrum is wide, and I have worked with both the highest end (where a former pupil is now studying for a PhD) through to the lower end where communication is virtually non-existent, and communication relies on the occasional touch or shared intensive interaction (which is an approach for teaching communication skills to those who are still at the early stages of development).

On many occasions autistic people are labelled as high or low functioning, which although summarises the person's ability to a degree, does come with the risk of categorising an individual who may have very complex needs. For those on the higher end of the spectrum libraries can provide invaluable help. Not only do they offer a tranquility not always available elsewhere, but they can also provide the opportunity of improving imagination. When I first started working with autistic children I was under the impression that imagination was very limited. This has proved to be false on occasions, and have seen an autistic child use a library to create stories using characters from a number of books.

When an autistic person becomes stressed, this can lead to challenging behaviour. This can be very upsetting for the people around them as they can see that the person needs help but does not know how to help them. This challenging behaviour often leads to a type of hyper ventilation. When working with autistic children in particular one helpful technique is to use bubbles to calm the child down. Blowing bubbles helps slow breathing down, and this helps the child start to recover from what it was that upset them in the first place. Holding a child can also help them recover, although for some children you just need to give time and space to recover.

As time goes by I will add some work that I have used with children with autism. None of this is rocket science, but rather the adaptation of sheets that I have used with non-autistic children. One thing to remember though is that you should not underestimate people with autism. Some are very capable, and even when you feel as though no progress is being made an advance may suddenly be made. Unlike most children, autistic children do not learn on the same curve. They learn in jumps, with times when they plateau and seem to stand still for want of a better term.

One form of autism that is often misunderstood is Asperger's syndrome. With this, the person is likely to lack social skills (amongst other things), but they can be very intelligent. For instance, I once worked with a teenager with Asperger's syndrome who was very intelligent, so much so that he was going to university a year early and taught himself to play the keyboard so well in a year that a music teacher that I know called him a genius. Even though this young man had been putting computer animation on YouTube from the age of eight, he had been sent to a special school as he had been a selective mute until the age of eleven, which had led people to believe that he was of limited intelligence.

Please do read more on the subject of autism as it is a subject that has been written about widely, and advances are always being made in both diagnosis and treatment. Indeed in the 2013 fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the diagnosis was eliminated and replaced by a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder on a severity scale. Despite these advances, my favourite book on the subject is an older one, although in its day the definitive work in many people's minds. Details of this are below, plus just a few of the many other good books available.