New SCORES Blog & Social Thinking Group Updates

December 17, 2014 ~ mrskelleyhively ~ Leave a comment

After battling with the interface for the former SCORES blog and having it eat several of my posts this semester, I’ve made the switch over to WordPress. This is the primary way that I keep parents up-to-date with helpful tools, information, and updates about the topics and skills we are learning in the Social Thinking groups.

If you’d bookmarked the old site, please update to this one. Also, please make sure to click “follow by email” on the sidebar, so that you will automatically be notified when new posts are added. I am in the process of moving all the tools and resources from the old site to this one and then will shut that site down. I will hopefully have all the resources and tools moved over by the end of the holiday break. I will send out an update when everything is complete.

Wondering about what exactly is Executive Functioning? Wondering how to help your child develop homework skills, organizational skills, and better time management? You’re not alone. These questions come up often in my conversations with parents. If it would be helpful to you, I am considering setting up a parent meeting one night early next semester to provide information, strategies, and answer questions regarding strategies you can employ at home to help your child develop his or her executive functioning skills. If this is something that would be helpful to you, please email me and let me know. If we have enough interest, I will make arrangements to open the building one evening and we can discuss ways to make homework less painful and more pleasant at your house. If we don’t have enough interest to set up an evening meeting, I will still be happy to share information one-on-one.

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Now..onto the fun stuff! Your kids have worked tremendously hard learning new social thinking skills and applying them to their classrooms. Hopefully, you’ve seen some application at home as well. If you’re unsure which group your child belongs to, email me and I’ll let you know!

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

1st grade Language/Social Thinking group: We are increasing our ability to effectively use a visual schedule, think about the “group plan”, be able to determine basic emotions through picture clues, practice Whole Body Listening, answer who/what/where/when questions on topic, use visual supports to identify applicable clues that help us answer basic “why” questions (see the WHY tool below), being able to demonstrate accurate non-verbal representation of actions, and engage in pretend play with objects used in ways that are non-traditional to increase cognitive flexibility.

Do “why” questions trip up your child? Do you find yourself thinking “huh?!” with the answers that result? This visual is a helpful tool that you can print and use at home to help support this skill. It helps children attend to the important information in a situation instead of becoming distracted by irrelevant details. When considering “why” something is happening or “why” someone feels the way they do, we need to pay attention to WHO is present, what they are DOING, what OBJECTS are involved, and WHERE they are. It is important to teach your child to consider context. Actions that are acceptable at home are not necessarily acceptable in other places. A perfect example is a child who has mastered the art of raising his hand to speak at school and then tries to apply that “rule” in all social situations resulting in “weird thoughts” if he raises his hand at a restaurant or playdate. Using this visual does take more time, but by doing so you are helping your child learn to make those cognitive connections that will help him in all academic and social areas. Feel free to click on the image above and download the pdf to use at home.

1st grade Social Thinking group: We had new members join our group this semester, so we’ve spent time building community, learning & reviewing our use of the group plan, thinking with our eyes, body in the group, whole body listening, and engaging in basic social problem solving. The boys have done a marvelous job applying their skills in their classrooms.

This visual is especially helpful when working on developing social problem solving skills. Feel free to click on the image below and download for your use at home. It is helpful to show that there are multiple solutions to a problem and that the cost or benefit of each outcome must be considered when choosing which option is best.2nd/3rd grade Social Detectives: We have added a new group member and have spent time teambuilding as well as identifying expected and unexpected behaviors that keep our fellow group members feeling calm vs upset.

We have spent time working on increasing our conversational flexibility, taking conversational turns, participating in conversation even when the topic is not of our choice or our particular interest.

We have spent time identifying calming strategies to use when upset and chose the particular strategies that work best for us to keep in our brain “toolbox”. Some of the strategies the kids have identified include:

deep breathing

using a stress ball or glitter bottle

going to a “calm, dark, still” place

using calming self-talk

asking for help

and our favorite, thinking of our happy place.

We also spent time identifying situations that commonly make us feel stressed and how stress feels in our bodies (tight muscles, headache, upset stomach, hot, cold, etc.). We then role played situations and used our newly discovered coping skills to practice calming.

We moved onto basic problem solving using the chart above. We discussed the cost/benefit of various choices and practiced in both role play, video-based instruction, and through games.

We’ve progressed into working on basic perspective taking and social inferencing. This is challenging and will definitely be a big focus for the spring semester!

4th grade Social Thinking Experts: The boys have welcomed a new member to the group and have worked on teambuilding and identifying expected & unexpected behaviors that keep the group moving forward or interrupt the group.

We’ve continued to develop our conversation skills including how to tell when others are interested or not interested, how to moderate talk time to keep others interested, and how to take turns in a conversation. The anchor that we use with conversational turn taking is that in a conversation we “toss a ball” between conversation partners. The “ball” does not go in a specific pattern, but it is important to (a) make sure to share the ball with others (no one likes a ball hog!) and (b) to catch the ball, not grab it. We modeled what it feels like at recess when someone grabs a ball away from you in a game (angry/frustrated) and made the connection to that same feeling when you “grab” the conversation away by interrupting or talking on top of others.

We’ve also worked on developing an understanding of idioms through fiction and everyday conversation.

We’ve targeted coping skills for stress and have worked to self-identify our stress levels and use strategies to calm our systems.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve begun working through a basic understanding of executive functioning, the brain structures that govern executive functioning, common distractors, and time management.

The boys started by learning that three parts of our brain structure guide the decision making process. The amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex.

Officer Amygdala is the first line of defense.

He decides immediately whether a situation is a threat that needs to be responded to through fight, flight, or freeze. If so, he responds accordingly. If not, he sends the information along to the pre-frontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex is our wise decision maker. Like Yoda, it takes information from the amygdala and the memories of past experiences from the hippocampus and uses this information to make a decision about how to handle the situation.

The hippocampus is our memory keeper. By accessing the memory of past experience or making connections between related events, the prefrontal cortex is able to make wise decisions and keep our responses calm and rational.

The boys then took this information and role played various scenarios determining whether the amygdala should react with fight/flight/freeze or should send it on to Yoda the PFC to problem solve.

We then started discussing the idea of time management. The boys self-identified various parts of their day at home and school and determined how effectively they use their time. We identified the positive results from effective time management and the costs of ineffective time management. Then they began working on evaluating how effectively they are able to estimate how long a task will take. We did interactive centers that involved time estimation. Each of the boys brought home a time estimation challenge to complete at home this week. If you haven’t heard about it yet, ask them about it. It is due at group on Thursday this week!

Finally, we revisited Superflex and the powers of the Unthinkable, Braineater (which we renamed Brainstealer since the boys decided that Braineater is entirely too zombie-ish!). The boys identified common distractors during their day, their current strategies to stay focused, and how effective (or ineffective) those strategies currently are.

As you can see, we’ve been busy! All the groups will continue to build on their knowledge in 2015 and will become even more amazing Social Thinkers!

Thank you for sharing your amazing, brilliant, oh-so-funny children with me. I wish you all a peaceful holiday and a fantastic 2015!

Social Thinking Group Updates ~ 3rd Nine Weeks

March 27, 2014December 14, 2014 ~ mrskelleyhively ~ Leave a comment

We’ve had a great time in Social Thinking groups over the past 9 weeks. Here are updates about the topics that we’ve tackled…

Kindergarten/1st grade group: We’ve been learning the basics of Whole Body Listening and have read the book Whole Body Listening Larry at School. We’ve practiced “looking like Larry” as we attend with our whole body to the group. We’ve continued to work on being able to accurately identify feelings in static examples and beginning to attach the “why” of thoughts to the feelings. We’ve worked on basic play skills including sharing, taking turns, participating in a game even when it is not our preferred activity, and handling winning and losing. Finally, we’ve begun to work on basic social problem solving in book format by reading a story with a problem and then rewinding back to the beginning to find another way to approach the issue that will result in a more positive solution. These boys are working hard!

1st grade group: We began this 9 weeks by studying the Social Detective. The Social Detective is a super smart dude who uses three tools to help him make good social guesses. The tools in the social detective’s toolbag are his EYES, EARS, and BRAIN. He takes the information he sees and hears and runs it through his brain computer to be able to make a smart social guess about what is expected and what might happen next.

We practiced first with static images and then moved onto short dynamic video clips where the boys had to identify what in the video was expected/unexpected and make a prediction about what might happen next. This is TOUGH, but they became successful Social Detectives!

Next, we moved on to beginning to learn about Superflex. Superflex is a super hero who uses his flexible brain power to help him defeat a team of Unthinkables. Unthinkables are not “bad guys”, but instead are troublemakers who bother all of us at different times. So far, we’ve learned about defeating Rockbrain (his power is making you get stuck on your own ideas and not flexing to work with the group) and Crankenstein (who makes you fuss and say or do mean things when you don’t get your way). When the boys demonstrated that they knew basic facts about Superflex and were ready to take on the challenge of growing their Superflexible powers, they were awarded with a Superflex cape. They have since earned their first “power badge” for demonstrating the power to defeat Rockbrain. They are currently working on earning their second “power badge” for defeating Crankenstein.

One of the ways that we’ve practiced defeating Rockbrain was by running obstacle courses on the playground. But there was a catch! At any time in the routine, we would call “freeze” and change the plan. The kids had to be able to switch their activity to match the new direction.

2nd grade: We have learned about applying our Superflex knowledge to solve social problems using the 5 Step Power Plan.

click to download

We have also engaged in a long unit on building conversation skills. The students have learned the parts of a conversation and that to maintain a conversation we have to keep the ball bouncing back and forth between participants. We can keep the ball bouncing by asking a follow-up question or comment. At home, you can practice this by encouraging your child to keep the ball bouncing back and forth between conversation partners during family time at dinner or even in the car as you run errands.

click here to download

Feel free to download either of the above visuals to help reinforce these concepts at home by clicking on the link below each image.

3rd grade: During this 3rd nine weeks, we had a great time applying the social thinking concepts that the boys have been working to develop over the past couple of years in a cooperative movie project. The boys were divided into teams and assigned at least two Unthinkables to target. They had to work together to develop a story with a beginning, middle, and end that stayed on-topic. They created storyboards to tell the story, wrote scripts, designed sets from Legos, and then took about a bazillion photographs with digital cameras. I then helped them construct a stop-action movie on the computer where we applied sound effects and the boys recorded their dialogue.

The boys had to use many skills that targeted executive functioning including setting a goal, planning, negotiation and compromise, time management, writing skills, and their individual targeted language/articulation goals.

Our movie premiere was quite the event and a visiting celebrity (Dr. Pena!) attended. The boys were super proud of themselves! And I was so impressed by the high level the boys applied all the social learning that they’ve done. This is a super group of young people!

Check out their fantastic movie creations here…

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We also finally harvested our garden. All groups were able to harvest a little bit, but unfortunately I only had my camera with me during one of the groups. 😦 So, here are a few shots of the great carrot/broccoli/cauliflower harvest.

The kids (and I!) definitely have great appreciation for anyone who lives off the land. 🙂

Considerations When Teaching Social Thinking

February 5, 2014 ~ mrskelleyhively ~ Leave a comment

An article was published recently by Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP and Pamela Crooke, PhD, CCC-SLP of Social Thinking Center in a recent addition of Attention Magazine by CHADD that examined the Cascade of Social Thinking. This is a great way to explain how I assess and plan for individual student Social Thinking instruction. I’d like to share a few excerpts from the article to better share the thought process that goes into analyzing each student’s social functioning and making critical decisions about this instruction.

When analyzing student social functioning, I look for many elements in both static and dynamic situations. Students must be able to accurately demonstrate various thought processes and actions in structured, static situations before being asked to generalize to more dynamic, changing situations. Often, this is why there is a difference between the experience that a parent may have with a particular social skill at home compared to what we see at school. At school, we practice the skill with the appropriate amount of scaffolding that the student requires at that time. Imagine this support as a highly involved scaffold at a construction site and over time the scaffolding is decreased. When a student requires a high level of prompting or cueing and a more structured/static situation to practice, the scaffolding level is high. Over time, we will move the skill to less prompting/cueing while keeping the practice opportunities structured and static. When the student can handle that level, we pull back the prompting or cueing and/or expand the people and environments in which they practice the skill. Eventually (hopefully!) the student can generalize the skill to many people and environments with minimal to no cueing.

As you can imagine, based upon the social complexity of the skill, this can take a good long while to achieve. The other issue is buy-in. The student needs to see the benefit to themselves of engaging in the hard work of practicing this new skill. Just like working out, developing social thinking skills takes a lot of stamina!

Take a look below at the Cascade of Social Thinking. This clearly explains the various levels that students travel as they develop their Social Thinking skills.
excerpted from Social Learning and Social Functioning by Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP and Pamela Crooke, PhD, CCC-SLP. Published in Attention Magazine by CHADD, October 2013 http://www.CHADD.org

Things are never quite as simple as they seem and this is most certainly the case with social learning. As

children, most of us followed a similar developmental journey when acquiring social skills but rarely do we

now give thought to which skills allow us to function across different people and places each day. In fact, it is

likely that we have no idea when we acquired the ability to take multiple perspectives, initiate

communication at the right time and place, enter in and out of groups, play cooperatively or collaboratively

exist with one another – it just happened.We certainly didn’t place a milestone on when we began to

understand context-specific concepts and the relationship to how people think, act and behave in that

situation. And yet, development marched on and we emerged with these concepts and skills. Our innate

ability to engage our social awareness and attention to self and others paved the way.

Now imagine the effects on social learning when an individual’s innate driver of his or her own social

attention and awareness is delayed or driven by a brain seeking the details that may or may not be a critical

part of the social situation. The result is a Pandora’s box filled with social challenges that foster more

struggles and social issues and so on. So, the question becomes, Can we address the individual needs of

different types of social learners in one size fits all social skills program?

We’ve developed a framework that has 6 critical synergistic concepts related to social abilities. We refer to this as the Cascade of Social Functioning. Each element in the cascade is based on current research and the

relationships between the concepts are drawn from our clinical experience. Consider how information in

one part of the cascade impacts how a student functions in another part of the cascade and each

subsequent concept. In other words, each concept flows into one another highlighting the social executive

functioning involved in social interactions.

Awareness to the situation: Ultimately, we are expected to adapt our social behavior to the situation, but

we must first be able to take note or be aware of the situation or context.

~Attention to social expectations within the situation requires one to consider the different

perspectives of others sharing space within the situation in order to figure out the related

expectations. The expectations are often unstated social rules, which are also referred to as the

“hidden rules” or “hidden curriculum”.

~Social self-awareness to figure out how one is perceived as meeting or failing to meet the

hidden rules. This requires us to consider other’s perspectives in order to determine if we need

to further adapt our behavior to do what is expected in the situation. A student who struggles

to attend to the first 2 steps in the cascade is usually observed as being “aloof” and lacks the

social self-awareness to self-monitor their behaviors.

~Literal vs. abstract interpretation of communication within the situation: A weaker ability

to understand another’s perspectives for social attention and self-monitoring results in

difficulty trying to interpret what others mean by what they say. For this reason, those who

have limited social self-awareness tend to interpret verbal and non-verbal language in a

more literal manner. Those who have more awareness of how their ideas and behaviors

may be interpreted in multiple ways by others are most likely to have the ability to

understand and express their ideas with abstract language.

~Concept verses detailed interpretation within the situation: Those with a more literal

manner of interpretation are more likely to see the concrete details of the situation

rather than the concept. It can logically be argued that when a person is so detailedfocused

that she cannot take note of the situation or how people are governed by the

situation, she would consequently struggle to gain a “main idea” or concept. Our highly

literal thinkers tend to also be very detail focused in how they see and interpret the

world. Those with stronger conceptual awareness tend to have stronger perspective

taking skills and be more successful at interpreting and responding to information as long

as they can organize their response in a timely manner using their executive functioning

skills.

~General verses social anxiety. Those who lack social self-awareness are typically very

literal and detail oriented leading them to experience anxiety dealing with transition

and change. This world-based anxiety appears in our students who envision their world

as maintaining sameness and cannot anticipate change (nor learn from past

experiences as how to cope with change) due to inflexibility in how they interpret and

respond to information. On the other hand, those with a great social attention,

self-awareness and interpretation are more likely to develop social anxiety in adolescent

years as they understand more clearly how they are perceived by others -even if unsure

as to what part of the social skills creates that perception.

Differentiating instruction based on social learning abilities rather than a diagnostic label:

As we study each of our students’ social behavior based on the 6 areas addressed in the cascade, our

understanding of his/her level of the social mind should become more clear and a pathway to developing a

treatment trajectory more relevant. At this point we begin to differentiate what types of lessons will benefit

the individual. For example, a student with weak perspective taking, poor self-awareness, highly literal,

detail focused with world based anxiety will need a treatment program that builds upon very basic Social

Thinking concepts along with other resources. We would start teaching from a perspective of what the

student currently understands about the social world…

However, for an individual with solid awareness of other’s perspectives, a good understanding of what the

expected behavior is in a particular situation (even with difficulty self-monitoring in the moment), the ability

to abstract information, and characteristics similar to neurotypical peers, a more nuanced Social Thinking

approach is critical. In stark contrast to the treatment approach for the literal learner describe previously,

this nuanced learner would require a deeper level of discussion about social expectations, how to consider

and manage different perspectives/emotions, and how to translate that knowledge into social behavioral

responses (social skills).

Other core Social Thinking treatment strategies provide information to help students improve the ability to

share space with others (e.g., working side by side others in a classroom), develop relationships with

different types of people (peers, teachers, coaches) for different types of reasons (friendship, team

collaboration, cooperation, hidden rules, etc.) However, it is important to note that most social concepts

across a school day expand beyond interpersonal relationships into interpreting and responding to the

academic classroom curriculum. With the Common Core or State Standards, all students – no matter the

age- are expected to participate in lessons that encourage them to consider another’s points of view in

written material, movies/videos, and classmates. Students are also expected to efficiently sort out the

difference between a concept and related details in order to participate in social conversations, classroom

discussions or expressing one’s ideas through written expression. The analysis of information that relates to

understanding others perspectives requires Social Thinking; the expression of those thoughts requires not

only Social Thinking but also social skills.

Copyright 2014 Think Social Publishing, Inc

The article in its entirety can be viewed by visiting this link What is Social Thinking article

Social Thinking Group October Updates

November 1, 2013December 14, 2014 ~ mrskelleyhively ~ Leave a comment

I cannot believe we are already through our first nine weeks! Time is flying. We have accomplished so much during this time. Here are a few highlights from Social Thinking Groups this month…

Kindergarten & 1st Grade Groups – We have continued our study of the basics of social thinking by reading about Thinking With Your Eyes. Did you know that you can think with your eyes? Yep, it’s a fact! The kids have learned that what they look at is what they are thinking about. They have practiced identifying what characters in the book and members of our group are looking at and thinking about by filling in their thought bubbles.

We’ve built on these skills by reading a book about The Group Plan. In our reading and follow-up activities, we have practiced identifying what the Group Plan is and how we can match our thoughts and actions to keep our brains in the group.

2nd Grade – The Second Grade Social Thinkers have now been promoted to Social Detective Status! They have learned that social detectives use tools from their social detective toolboxes to help them figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. They can then use these tools to make smart social guesses.

The tools that we all have in our social detective toolboxes are our eyes, ears, & brain. We take the information that we see and hear in our social situations, run it through our brain computers and we can make a smart guess about what might happen next! It’s an amazing superpower to have!

Using these tools has helped us practice identifying expected and unexpected behaviors. It is very important to remember that behaviors are not “good” or “bad”. They are just expected or unexpected in the situation. When people engage in expected behaviors they keep the group feeling good. When they engage in unexpected behaviors people might feel uncomfortable, angry, or have weird thoughts about us. Here are some helpful visuals to work with your child at home on expected and unexpected behavior. You can click here to download a copy.

3rd Grade – Our 3rd grade Social Thinkers have done an extensive study on conversation skills. We have learned how to tell when it is a good time to have a conversation vs a no-so-great time. How to tell when others are interested vs not interested. We have learned about how body language affects our conversations. We have examined conversation maps and identified ways to keep the ball bouncing back and forth between conversation partners.

Over the next week or so we will wrap up our study of conversation by looking at different ways to maintain and extend conversations using non-verbal cues, humor, asking for clarification, sharing a similar feeling or event, asking questions to get more information, making comments that show that you understand how the other person feels, offering help, and making a complimentary comment.

Social Thinking Group Updates ~ September 2013!

September 25, 2013December 14, 2014 ~ mrskelleyhively ~ Leave a comment

We’ve had a great time in our first four weeks of Social Thinking group this year. The kids have done a fantastic job welcoming new members to the groups and continuing to build upon skills learned last year.

Here is what we’ve been up to…

Kinder Social Thinkers – We’ve begun using the Incredible Flexible Me curriculum to learn about what thoughts and feelings are. We’ve learned that what we look at is what we are thinking about. We’ve practiced keeping particular topics in our “thought bubbles”. We have used play to practice taking turns and sharing. We’ve practiced identifying basic emotions in ourselves and in others through static pictures.

1st grade Social Thinkers – We’ve reviewed concepts from last year using the Incredible Flexible Me curriculum including what are thoughts and feelings. We’ve begun working on recognizing our feelings in the context of “Zones”. The kids have practiced identifying scenarios that create feelings in the various zones and have modeled those feelings through photos/video. You can see an example of the Zones of Regulation visual below. We’ve begun to work on finding “tools” in our environment that can help us change our “zone”.

We have also worked to plan and install our Speech-Social Communication Learning Garden! Our 3rd grade social thinkers were responsible for the actual building of the garden. Our 1st grade social thinkers were in charge of adding soil to the garden and planting two different types of broccoli and cauliflower.

Here are some photos from our garden planting day:

Working together to spread the soil

Planting cauliflower

Planting broccoli

More broccoli!

Taking turns with the watering cans

2nd and 3rd grade Social Thinkers – We’ve spent a good amount of time building community with new group members and beginning our Zones work. The kids have learned to identify their own physical and emotional state, represent it on our Learning Zone chart, and are now beginning to practice using various “tools” to change their feelings. We will continue to work on this over the next couple of weeks. You can view an example of a Zones of Regulation visual below. In addition, these marvelous students have used our Get Ready – Do – Done strategy to plan and build our Learning Garden. Mrs. D and I were so impressed with the amazing teamwork, group planning, and sharing that occurred during this process. We have some amazing social thinkers in these groups!

Check out our photos from garden building day:

Reading the Garden Kit Instructions

Construction time!

Teamwork!

Action shot with the rubber mallet!

Planting Buttercrunch lettuce

More lettuce!

Planting Fire Power Lettuce! Wowzers!

Watering our newly planted Circus Carrot seeds!

Finally, I have some exciting news. As you know, Dr. Peña and Ms. Kane are both great supporters of the SCORES and Speech/Language Programs. They have allowed us to expand our sensory break space into another room that is being shared with after-school groups. We’ve been able to build three center areas including a Fine Motor Center, Gross Motor Center, and Calm Body Center. The students are able to use this area for planned body breaks as well as those on-the-spot needed body breaks when they are having difficulty keeping their body or brain in the group. If you’d like to check out photos of the space, you can visit the collaborative blog that I write with Mrs. De Los Santos that is geared for other speech therapists and special education teachers. You can view the post by clicking here.

Thanks for your support!
Mrs. H

Social Thinking Group Updates

February 2, 2013 ~ mrskelleyhively ~ Leave a comment

We’ve had a great time over the past month in all of the Social Thinking groups. Here are some highlights of our learning activities.

Kinder only group: We’ve worked on a combination of activities focusing on language development (correct prepositional use, pronouns, descriptive words and sequencing). We’ve also worked on identifying expected behaviors for indoor play and outdoor play. We’ve practiced playing free center activities, playing on the playground, and how to play tag in a group.

Kinder/1st grade group: We’ve spent a lot of time on play skills including indoor and outdoor play. We’ve identified expected and unexpected behavior for both and spent time practicing how to play in ways that create good thoughts and feelings in others in both free play settings as well as cooperative learning groups.

2nd grade group: We’ve begun to delve into the Superflex curriculum. We have learned how to defeat Rockbrain, Blurting Bob, and Braineater. We’ve studied in-the-brain distractors (such as recurrent thoughts, worries, or preferred topics) and out-of-the-brain distractors. We’ve practiced finding strategies that will help us get our brain back in the group.

5th grade: We started off the semester designing Vision Boards. We first brainstormed all the parts of a balanced life (social relationships, education, health, leisure, work/school, goals) and created boards with picture representations of our goals in each of these areas. These vision boards help us relate our social thinking skills to personal goals for each student. We’ve also focused on in-the-brain and out-of-the-brain distractors and strategies to help refocus attention. We have spent time revisiting the nonverbal cues that show others that we are listening and paying attention in class. A very important connection that we have been discussing is deciding what thought we want to create in others and remembering to show our listening through non-verbal behaviors even if we can listen without those non-verbals. For example, some students argue that they don’t need to turn their eyes or shoulders toward the teacher to listen in class. We acknowledge that many students on the Autism spectrum can listen and learn without turning toward the teacher, but turning your eyes and shoulders toward the teacher and raising your hand to ask/answer questions tells the teacher that you are listening and creates positive thoughts and feelings in teachers.

Social Thinking Group Updates

December 20, 2012December 14, 2014 ~ mrskelleyhively ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been super busy working in our Social Thinking groups. I’m proud of all the hard work that the kids have been putting into learning new skills. Here are some of the things we’ve been working on and resources you can use at home…

Kinder group #1: We’ve been working on developing language skills for positional words including “on, under, and above”. We’ve also worked on expanding our recognition of basic feelings facial expressions.

Kinder/1st grade: We’ve continued working on expanding the accurate recognition of facial expressions. We’ve also worked on learning how to use a 5 point scale to identify our anxiety level, triggers that typically put us in the “danger zone” (4 or 5), and strategies to use to bring our anxiety back down to a manageable level (1 or 2). The 5 point scale is adopted from Kari Dunn Burton’s work The Incredible 5 Point Scale.

The calming sequence is adopted from her book When My Worries Get Too Big. The instructions for the calming sequence are to: close your eyes, breathe in and out slowly, and rub your thighs. We also add the instruction to “think of your happy place”. The kids all came up with a location or image they could think of that made them feel calm and good. Ask your child where his “happy place” is. It is a great idea to practice using the calming sequence during calm periods so that it is easier to access during stressful moments.

2nd grade: We’ve spent a great deal of time delving into Superflex (created by Michelle Garcia Winner) and the strategies to defeat the Unthinkables. Superflex is a superhero who uses flexible thinking to solve social problems.

The two main Unthinkables that we have covered are Rockbrain (the boss of the Unthinkables) who makes us get stuck on our own ideas and not be flexible with alternative ways of doing things and Glassman who makes us have big reactions to small problems. The boys have identified common situations that cause them to have difficulty with Rockbrain and Glassman and strategies to defeat them. Please feel free to use any of these resources at home to help your child (or have your child help you!) defeat the Unthinkables.

The main calming tool that we are using to defeat Glassman and start to problem solve is progressive relaxation. Here is a visual that you can use to guide at home. The “shortcut” way is just to tighten fists and release with a deep breath.

We also use the following guidelines to help us determine what size the problem really is. Sometimes problems can feel really big, but when we check it out we find that they are more manageable than we originally thought.

5th grade: We have been working on continuing our discussion about conversation skills and have explored how to identify sarcasm. As you can imagine as we prepare for middle school, recognizing sarcasm is an important skill to know! We discussed the common characteristics of sarcasm which include variations in tone, saying the opposite of what is meant, and appropriate audiences for sarcasm – usually not your teachers or parents! 😉 We watched video examples of sarcasm and identified what the real meaning is in the verbal exchange.

We are eager to expand all these skills in the new year!

I want to wish all of you a relaxing, peaceful and joyous holiday. I hope you all get a chance to relax and enjoy quiet time with your precious kiddos! See you in 2013!