Six content areas are addressed in each child’s individualized curriculum: communication, social interactions, play skills, fine and gross motor development, cognition, and personal independence and participation in family life routines.   A developmental orientation underlies the curriculum.  Chronologically important skills are also stressed, and task analysis is used to break down skills into small, easily mastered components, with shaping and chaining used to develop complex skill sequences. Using chronologically appropriate materials found in natural settings is stressed.

Communication

Communication and imitation are the means by which people carry out social relationships and pass on their culture and accumulated social knowledge to the next generation.  There is nothing that is more important for a young child with autism than the development of intentional, spontaneous communication. All children need a useful communication system, and this need dominates the treatment.  The Early Start Denver Model uses a multifaceted approach to development of communication that includes four separate teaching strands, each with its own sequential curriculum, that begin in the first treatment session and permeate all of the child's treatment. 

These four areas of emphases include:

1. Teaching the child to use and understand nonverbal intentional communicative gestures;
2. Teaching imitation skills involving objects, actions, and sounds;
3. Teaching the meaning and importance of speech; and
4. Teaching symbolic representations

Play

The Denver Model began with a focus on developing play skills. Play of all kinds: social, physical, constructive, symbolic, and independent - is built into the child's curriculum because of the crucial role it plays in normal development.  Children with autism cannot benefit maximally from interactions with other children if they cannot engage in the core social and learning play activities that preschoolers use.  Age-appropriate play skills are directly taught. Besides the inherent developmental value of play skills, the ability to engage in age-appropriate play helps the child with autism “fit in” to the group and reduces the risk of social isolation.

Sensory activities

In the Early Start Denver model, the child's sensory system is viewed as a crucial regulator of attention, arousal, and affect.  Sensory social activities are a primary means to optimize attention and positive affect in order to facilitate learning. 

Personal independence and participation in family routines

In the Early Start Denver model, child spontaneity and independence are highly valued. Skill development in this area is developed by having choices, carrying out routines of daily living, independent play and independent, goal-directed tasks and chores that contribute to family life.  This is often a potential area of strength for persons with autism, and developing these skills as fully as possible allows the person with autism to demonstrate their competence.

Social Skills

The ability to initiate, maintain, and appropriately terminate social interactions and to engage in a wide range of social activities is crucial for the interpersonal and communicative development of young children with autism.  Social skills are carefully taught embedded in natural social exchanges: sensory social activities, joint activity routines with materials, and dyadic interactions that occur in all life routines.  The entire communication curriculum is by nature a social curriculum as well, and teaching imitation skills, play skills, and nonverbal and verbal communicative behaviors, across preschool, structured teaching, and family life routines, are core social interventions.

Motor skills

The Denver Model understands that deficits in motor development, motor sequencing, and motor planning (dyspraxia) are often present in autism and can interfere greatly with social exchanges, play, independence in daily living skills, and preschool participation.  Interventions in this area are aimed at functional skill development for play and learning.  Motor skill development targeted via systematic instruction with a variety of typical toddler activities and toys, adapted as needed.  Gross motor play is taught as part of play and leisure skills activities, involving ball play including catching, throwing, and song and movement games.

Hand development is a particular focus of intervention across the preschool years, because later problems with dressing skills, handwriting, and other fine motor tasks are seen as resulting from both poor muscle tone and praxis, as well as the accumulating effects of lack of practice and challenge over the years.  Initially, cause and effect and one step action toys are used to build hand and finger manipulation, hand strength, bilateral coordination and purposeful play. As the hands are developing through a developmental motor sequence, tool use is incorporated into toy play and eventually into writing, art activities, home activities, dressing skills, and other preschool activities. 

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