Aidan was busy coloring a duck drawing brown earlier this month when classmate Gianni DeDonno, 5, pulled up a chair.

Aidan, can I color with you?" Gianni asked, sitting down and staking a claim to the other side of Aidan's open coloring book.

After turning the page, Gianni neatly colored the beak of a toucan with his fuchsia marker, while Aidan drew sharp lines of aqua across the outline of a fish.

"Just like me, nice and slow," Gianni coached.

One of the nondisabled pupils at Minding Miracles Learning Center, Gianni has taken 3-year-old Aidan under his wing. Heather Kirschner, the center manager, calls Gianni Aidan's "sidekick."

The Old Bridge program includes children with and without disabilities; those with special needs primarily have forms of autism, like Aidan, Kirschner said.
Because children with autism mimic each other, it's useful to have typical children to model off of, Kirschner said. The typical children, in turn, learn to understand their peers who have more difficulty understanding or completing tasks, making them more accepting and better able to handle others when they get older, she said.
Some of the disabled children are placed there by school districts that do not have suitable programs for them, Kirschner said. And often, children like Aidan, who came from programs that were ill-fitting, progress quickly when they begin, Kirschner said.

"A lot of times, if they come from an inappropriate program where they weren't being challenged enough and now they receive what they need, you'll see a drastic change," she said.

In Aidan's case, it means that he rarely grinds his teeth anymore and has been saying more words, his mother, Katina Ventimiglia, said. Lately, he's been speaking in sentences.

He practices skills such as counting to 10 and drawing the letter "A" in a cubby in the back room, working one-on-one with a staff member. Later, he reinforces what he learned by using the skills in the regular classroom - a practice called "natural environment teaching."

There's also playtime, of course. But even that has its built-in benefits.
Shortly after Aidan and Gianni finished coloring, Kirschner brought out a bottle of shaving cream. The pupils put on aprons and gathered at the round table as she sprayed globs of the cream for them to spread around the table. They covered small objects, inundating toy Tiggers and immersing their arms in the slippery foam as the scent of Barbasol filled the room.

It's a fun activity, but also designed to stimulate sensory needs and help the pupils become familiar with different textures.

And it's a way to practice other skills. Midway through the white slippery mess, Kirschner helped Aidan recall an earlier lesson as he ran his index finger through the shaving cream. Up, down, across," she said.

His fingers followed the directions, slowly. Until he'd formed an "A."
Aidan's face raised in a smile and Kirscher and the other instructors in the room joined him as he cheered.
"Yaaaaaaay!"