Search for ABA therapy activities and you will get lists — fifty ideas, a hundred, sorted by age. Lists are the easy part. What almost none of them say is the part that decides whether an activity teaches anything: how you run it.
The same ten minutes with the same cards can be a teaching session or a pleasant way to pass the time. The difference is not the material.
What turns an activity into teaching
Four things, and they are all small:
One clear request. The child should know what is being asked without a running commentary around it. “Give me the apple” beats “OK sweetie, now look, can you find the one that’s the same, the apple, where’s the apple?” — the second buries the instruction in eight other words.
Help that is there from the start and then leaves. The most common mistake is to let the child guess first and correct afterwards. An error is not neutral information; it is a practiced response, and a child who answers wrong three times has rehearsed the wrong answer three times. Make the first attempts almost impossible to fail, then withdraw the help so gradually they do not notice.
A consequence that the child actually wants. Praise works for some children and is noise for others. Whatever it is, it arrives immediately and it is worth working for.
Something written down. Not a research protocol — a tally. Without it, “he’s doing better” is a feeling, and feelings about a child you love are not a measure.
Four activities that need almost nothing
Matching. Two identical pictures, one shown and one to find. This is the floor of almost everything else: before a child can link a word to an object, they have to be able to tell one thing from another and say “these two go together”. It needs two copies of three or four pictures and nothing else.
Sorting. The same idea, one step up: a pile of items and two boxes. Animals here, food there. It works with real objects, which is an advantage — spoons and socks are already in the house.
Requesting. The child asks for something they want, in whatever form they have: a word, a sound, a point, a picture handed over. This is the one activity where the reward is not arbitrary, because getting the thing IS the consequence. Put a preferred item in view and slightly out of reach and wait a beat before helping.
One-step instructions. “Sit down.” “Give me the cup.” “Touch your nose.” Short, one action, no chain.
Everything on the hundred-item lists is a variation of these four, or a game built on top of one.
How to pick today’s activity
Start where the child already succeeds and move one notch. If matching two identical photos is easy, try matching a photo to a drawing of the same thing. If that is easy, try a spoken word to a picture. If a step produces errors, you moved too far — go back one and come forward more slowly.
The test is not whether the activity looks advanced. A child scoring 100% on something slightly too easy is learning; a child scoring 40% on something impressive is practicing failure.
The part almost every list skips
An activity that works inside the session and nowhere else has not finished teaching. The skill has to appear with a different adult, in a different room, with a different picture of the same thing — otherwise the child has learned this card on this table, which is a real thing to have learned and not the thing you wanted.
So the check is cheap: once a week, ask for something you taught, somewhere you did not teach it, with no help at all. What happens then is the actual result.
And be clear about what a matching score proves. A child who matches pictures reliably has shown they can tell those things apart and pair them — that is receptive discrimination, and it is worth having. It is not evidence that they understand the word, or that they will use it.
Further reading
- Our readiness check — three questions, one minute, no signup — for whether tablet-based practice suits your child right now.
- Ten well-spent minutes, a real home session step by step.