Improv for Autism: Using Theatre to Teach Social Communication Skills to Children and Youth with Autism

The purpose of this project was to create a social communication curriculum that specifically targets deficits in social skills for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This curriculum is designed to provide speech-language pathologists working with individuals with ASD a variety of improvisational theatre activities for clinical use. These activities target specific social skills with which children with ASD may struggle, including: expressing and interpreting emotion, using theory of mind, making conversation, maintaining a topic of conversation, taking turns, initiating, asking others questions about themselves and answering questions about themselves.