I agree with you . Kids need time at this age to play . But . a lot of these kids have zero interest in playing with other children I say this because besides the accepted fact that social skills deficit is a part of ASD , I would say at least 90 % of the kids I work with are like this . Additionally , you miss the point of teaching kids to identify itemsbeings by name . We don ' t teach a child to discriminate between a cat and a dog because we care that they know this difference . We teach them this so they learn to pair the spoken name of an item with its image and are reinforced for doing so , increasing the likelihood of them doing the same at a later time . I understand why this would be confusing but don ' t focus on the lower order skill simple discriminations focus on the higher order skill repertoire this is accomplished via multiple exemplar training .