FUN & FUNCTIONAL LEARNING "...the positive effects of involvement with nature on health, concentration, creative play, and a developing bond with the natural world..." - Professor Chawla, international expert on urban children and nature, from Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv

The Fun & Functional approach to learning and experiencing was developed by Dr. Glahn and her colleagues over a period of 10 years gathering empirical documentation. Students were diagnosed with Autism (ASD), ADD/ADHD, Learning Disabilities, and/or other developmental disabilities. The critical questions asked by Dr. Glahn and her undergraduate and graduate students were:

• Did the student learn meaningful information and skills?
• Did the student truly experience much joy along the way…this day?

The combined strategies and resulting concept yielded a holistic approach to teaching and learning. The fundamental intertwining of four distinct instructional elements resulted in a viable, and replicable set of instructional methodologies. These four instructional elements are:

• Behaviorism including ABA & NLP strategies
• Cognitive competencies & preferences
• Developmental trends & performance
• Experiential teaching activities

Children with ASD, ADHD and related disorders need to learn from nature through experiential educational opportunities just as all children should, IF spontaneity, creativity and connectedness are to be sought and fostered. Fun & Functional embraces experiential teaching.

The most influential of the four components rests with experiential teaching. Not because it is more valuable than the other three components, but because it is most frequently overlooked. It takes specific training to keep teaching active with relevant multi-sensory sources of input. Behavioral, cognitive and developmental perspectives can be readily taught, since these areas have been systematized. These three instructional components are based on demonstrated knowledge, especially the empirically based field of behaviorism. (Without it, where would Autism be?) These can be called science. However, experiential teaching is more art than science and requires extreme fluid, responsive and flexible teaching. Therefore, it is much more difficult to artfully teach the interventionist to be experiential in orientation. Oh, so much more difficult! It is difficult to learn to truly connect, but good therapy is all about connecting and remembering, that life really is: All about relationships!

Fun & Functional reduces these four instructional elements to the simplistic and teachable by repeatedly asking: Did the student learn functional skills & was there fun along the way? All the time, teaching the teachers individually based behavioral strategies which previously assessed these student's cognitive capabilities and developmental readiness. The outcome is that persons conducting intervention can be successfully taught to adopt and incorporate the strategies associated with the Fun & Functional Approach, because it has been systematized.