Do You Know the Biscotti Kid?

I have shared my love for Sesame Street’s social emotional videos before, especially Biscotti Karate !  They have an entire library of videos that you can use to teach SEL (social emotional learning) concepts such as waiting, sharing, emotional regulation and whole body listening!  My students LOVE the video with Cookie Monster as the Biscotti Kid, and we talk about listening with our whole body often in my autism and preschool classrooms.

There is a lot of exciting research going on in the field of autism in the Atlanta area and part of these studies and research are being implemented in my county. My school is part of a research and teaching program with The Marcus Autism Center’s Emily Rubin, and last week we were videotaped on how we are implementing the SEE-KS and  SCERTS models in our autism and preschool classrooms.  There is nothing like being recorded on a Monday morning with a wild and woolly class of eight K-2 students with autism, but my friends were super stars that day!!

We reviewed the Biscotti Kid video (they have seen it previously this year) and then their fabulous teacher created an anchor chart to help our kids sort whole body vs. not whole body listening.  I made visuals using Boardmaker for everyone to get a turn, but you can also use Smarty Symbols or Lesson Pix to create these images:

Next we made our own version of the Biscotti Kid’s cookie belt using tag board, yarn and this awesome clip art of Body Parts that I bought from Educlips TPT store.   I grabbed these tags already hole punched at Hobby Lobby for under 2 bucks this week.  Next, we  glued each piece onto a tag (eyes watching, ears listening, mouth quiet, body calm).   Add a little fine motor threading into this project and voila’, a Biscotti Kid Cookie Belt (or necklace, if you cut the yarn too short like I did)!

The last piece of this fun activity was for my students to draw themselves and identify how they use their whole body to listen.   I got these body templates at Hobby Lobby too and they have a TON of uses over the next few weeks with me!  I will be posting some ideas in the coming weeks to teach more social language concepts.  We also use the book Whole Body Listening Larry to teach these same concepts in our speech sessions, and we do this often as it’s not a once and done lesson!  This fabulous teaching story adds feelings and thoughts to our listening skills and is a great next step tool.

To encourage carryover with my friends after our lesson, I gave the teacher and parapro a bag of cookies (Oreos and their gluten free counterparts from Glutino). I showed my kids and told them that if their teachers caught them listening with their whole bodies, they would get a cookie, just like the Biscotti Kid!

Have you used this video with teaching SEL?  Share your ideas here!

Coming Soon!

Hey Friends!  You can probably make a smart guess by looking at the picture above and know that my blog is undergoing a make-over!!  I am really excited to show you my new blog, and have some fun prizes to celebrate too!  Stay tuned and I’ll be back soon to share more ideas on how to support social language….

Disco Chickens and Social Thinking…

I recently started a new school job as a SLP (speech language pathologist).  I moved to a new county after fifteen years in my  former school, and hoped for the best.  While no job is perfect, this one is pretty promising!  There are five (yes, five full time) SLPs, supporting a large school with multiple special needs and self-contained classes at the elementary level. It is a quick commute to my school from my new home (lots of changes this year!), but one day last week, I got stuck behind a tractor, making my drive time a whopping fifteen minutes.  The road by my house was shut down this week for a bit, due to a wandering cow.  I’m not in Kansas Atlanta anymore, am I?!

** see postscript at the bottom of this post!!

The week continued with a school tour, and lo and behold, we have a huge garden near the playground (there are often yummy tomatoes in the workroom for anyone who wants to take them home).  Right next to the garden are two goats, a duck pool and a chicken house with a disco ball (see the picture above), totally unexpected, but in a good way!! My speech peeps and I started thinking about how we could do thematic therapy out here:  farmticulation,  chicken chat conversation skills, billy goat grammar….We could do this all.day.long.  Word play is our forte (I think I need to put that on a T-shirt)!

All this change and possibility got me thinking about the social language concepts that I teach my students each year: flexible thinking, emotional regulation, sharing space effectively with others, thinking about other people, using a social filter, etc…  I am using ALL of these and more as I adjust to my new school and the huge learning curve of changing to a new system, kids, co-workers, building, etc. !!  Add to this that four of the five of us are new to the county, so we all have to be social thinkers to work together successfully.  Our profession is often associated with SLPs being the tiniest bit of type A personalities, but thankfully, my fellow SLPs are smart, funny and flexible thinkers.  It was a good reminder to me that the Social Thinking® lessons that I teach my students are skills that we will use across our lifespan, not just in school, and how powerful and valuable they truly are!!

I am so excited to start my new adventures and I hope that those of you starting school soon are excited too!  Here’s to a great year, and if you stop by to visit my school, you can probably find me hanging out with the disco chickens by the playground….

Post script:  A cow wandered in front of my school yesterday! I think he wants to join in all the barnyard fun with us!

 

 

 

 

 

I am Ready (kind of)!

This is the start of an exciting year for me.  I went back to work this week in a new county, with four other full-time SLPs at a fabulous elementary school.  We have nine self-contained classrooms!  I know the year ahead is going to be a learning curve for me, but Je Suis Prest!  For you non-Outlander fans, that means “I am ready!” and it will also be my motto for the year (** if you haven’t read the Outlander books or watched the Starz series, get thee to a library/Amazon stat!!).

I have two self-contained autism classrooms, a self-contained pre-K class, and Kindergarten grade level students that I am supporting this year and started to look at my TPT resources to prepare! Here are a few products that I am going to use, to start my year off right:

My active listening interactive book will help us all start off on the right foot, with how to listen from head to toe! This book is also part of a social language interactive book bundle. I’ll add the Biscotti Karate video from Sesame Street to reinforce this important social concept that I am certain to revisit throughout the year!

I am introducing the concepts of emotional regulation, mindfulness and self control with my friends, using this packet!  Another Sesame Street video that aligns perfectly to this concept is this one from Cookie Monster, Me Want It, But Me Wait!

Do you know any “Me Monsters“?  I do and that’s why I wrote this original social skills story and activity packet on thinking about other people.  My students will meet the Me Monsters:  Allaboutme, Gimme, Mefirst and Metoo and help the Me Monsters learn how to think about others at school.  I will add yet another awesome Cookie Monster Sesame Street video on sharing :  Share It Maybe

**I have a Pinterest social skills video board with the Sesame Street videos pinned or you can find them on my social youtube channel too.  Create your own Pinterest boards and add videos that align to the social concepts you are teaching throughout the year, and voila, you will have an easy resource at your fingertips!

Last but not least, this fun little freebie is a great way to get to know your students and for them to get to know each other the first weeks of school!

What are you doing to ready yourself for the school year?  Share any great activities or videos that work for your students here!

Stay in my head or say it instead?

Using a social filter, keeping some thoughts in our heads and saying some thoughts out loud, is a tricky concept for my students.  Heck, it’s a tricky concept for most adults these days!  It is a social language idea that I circle back to practice with my students.  It is not a once and done skill, so I am always looking for different ways to address the idea.  I use video clips from movies and commercials, great teaching videos from Everyday Speech, fantastic free activities from Jill Kuzma’s website  ,and the teaching materials from Social Thinking .

For my younger students, they need a concrete way to visualize this concept.  As with other language concepts, adding a motor component helps my kids to gain another way of connecting and remembering the ideas, rather than just talking about it.   Here is a cheap and fun way to add this teaching concept to your therapy closet!   I save containers, like the tall oatmeal cylinder boxes.  They tend to be sturdier and I like that the plastic top makes it an activity container as well, keeping the cards together when I am not using it.

Make sure the container is empty and  clean (you don’t want any buggy friends joining your speech party).  I print off blank faces using fabulous clip art that I purchased from Educlips and Sarah Pecorino, as well as rainbow brains from Hidesy’s Clip Art .  I have my students draw a face to look like themselves on the blank templates.  If fine motor is a concern, you can use googly eyes, stickers or magazine photos cut apart to make a face (or what a great co-treat idea with an Occupational Therapist).  If you have the time and a color printer, you can even enlarge and laminate actual pictures of your student’s face for their container.  I like the idea of personalizing the faces to help connect the social idea we are using to the students.  Once your face is complete, help your students cut out the mouth to make an opening.  I cut out the same shape on the side of the box and cut a large slit on the container lid.

Next, after talking through the concept of a social filter, we draw pictures to represent topics or write out scenarios to sort what we should keep in our head (think) vs. what we can say.   Then we take turns putting these cards into our brains (top of the box) or into the mouth. I have several of these social filter scenario activity cards, like these , in my TPT store , but you can always make your own! After the activity is done, the cards stay in the box for easy storage.

If we need to focus on just the concept of keeping thoughts in our head (because they might make people upset if we say them out loud), then we can make a cute little brain box out of sugar packet container, with a brain on the front (see picture above).   Open the lid to put the thoughts inside the box, without a mouth for them to escape!

What do you use to teach the social concepts to your kids?   Share here!

Social language, with a cherry on top!

I work on the concepts of emotional identification and regulation in therapy with my kids a LOT! I love finding different ways of working on these skills, particularly using games. I also love the Zones of Regulation program for teaching and supporting these concepts. So when I find a way to combine the two, it’s a win!  If you have ever played Hi Ho-Cherry-o! ™, you might have noticed that the bucket colors correspond to the primary colors (red, green, blue, yellow) that are also used in Zones.  I know!!!

How do we use the game to work on emotional regulation?  I am so glad you sort of, not really asked!  Once you have introduced the Zones curriculum to your students and they have a good understanding of the concepts, then you can start to generalize the skills with this game. The spinner has cherries 1-4, a dog, a bird, and a spilled cherry basket icon.  Each person’s tree holds 10 cherries, but we start the game with ten cherries in each bucket.   Before we start the game, we talk about how each bucket color represents a category of emotions that correlate to Zones of Regulation.  For example, the blue bucket can represent emotions such as sad, disappointed or tired.   One the things I really like about the Zones program is that the authors help us understand that there are no bad emotions, it’s okay to experience them all in the right time and place.  The Zones also teaches us how to regulate and match our reactions to these feelings.

Next, we spin the spinner and if we land on the cherries (1-4), we identify a situation that might make us have feelings in the zone we choose (example:  identify 3 situations that might put us in the red zone- someone cutting in line, being yelled at or your brother taking your bike without asking).  Then we put the corresponding cherries from the red bucket on the tree.  If you land on the bird, you have to listen to a social-emotional scenario and decide if the reaction matches the level of emotion.  Hello working on size of a problem and identifying the size of a reaction!  If you land on the dog, you have to identify a strategy to help you move from red, yellow or blue zones back to the green zone (calm, happy).  If you land on the spilled cherry bucket, we have to clear a tree of all the cherries on it (just one tree).  This is a real time lesson on emotional regulation and dealing with frustration and disappointment!  The goal of the game is to fill all the trees, empty the buckets and “grow” our social emotional learning.  It’s emotional regulation with a cherry on top!

What other board games have you adapted to use for social language therapy?  Share here!

Judging a book by it’s cover…

We have all heard the old adage, “Never judge a book by it’s cover.”   This gratefully comes to mind each time I run into someone I know when I am in my grubbiest attire with no makeup on!  This is also a social concept that we work on to talk about how our appearance on the outside doesn’t always match what we have on the inside of us!  This is a pretty challenging concept cognitively and it is not a once and done lesson.

This discussion can lead to the related concepts of how we want others to see and think about us, why our words and actions matter, and how we need to be thinking of others as well.   These topics can open up painful and difficult discussions, so don’t be tied to your lesson plan.   Instead, take these teachable moments and go deep with your students, especially in the middle school years.  I know it teeters on the edge of counseling in social language groups, but these concepts are rough waters that our kids need to talk about in a safe place, with someone they trust.

One activity that you may want to try to illustrate these social concepts is to make an actual book cover (hello literal interpretation!). I grabbed some old books at Goodwill and use the original jackets to help the students make a prediction or good guess about what the book might be about, to introduce our activity.  We then make our own book jackets to represent ourselves.  You can go old school and use a paper grocery bag, use legal size paper to make into a book jacket or even craft paper to make a template using an actual book jacket.  I picked up some composition notebooks for next to nothing to use and they double as a journal for my students too!  I found this great visual tutorial  on Pinterest from Terri Mauro, or you can order these paper jackets on Amazon, if you only need a few and are a little type A, with mad SLP money to burn.

Next, we brainstorm ideas of how we want to be seen.  There are so many related concepts and activities, you may have your social lesson plans for an entire month!   What do we want others to see when they are around us?  Those words and images are then illustrated (or glued, painted, written) on the book cover by each student.

It will be interesting to see if they would choose the same words and pictures at the end of the year versus the beginning.  The beauty of this concept is that you can totally change the cover anytime you want! These covers are also great illustrations to use throughout the school year to address different social topics (perspective taking, judging others, how I make people think and feel, etc..).   So maybe we can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but we can sure learn a lot about ourselves by it!

 

 

Trust is a two way street.

This past school year brought an unusually large amount of contentious speech meetings my way, involving attorneys and advocates.  I traveled our large county to support my fellow SLPs in these long, stressful meetings.   It began to feel like these meetings were becoming the norm, at least in my former school system, without the parents first communicating their concerns directly to the SLP and/or teachers.  To be fair, I have worked with some fabulous advocates who really had what was best for the student at the heart of their agendas, and I was always happy to be part of those meetings!   The bottom line is that this is what all of us should be aiming for, right?  I have also been the mom of a child with an IEP, so I have been on both sides of this table.

What is alarming to me is the tendency to jump over the social protocol of talking to someone they have a concern with directly.  Instead, they immediately call a meeting, armed with legal representation.  This leads to a lot of miscommunication, frustration and anxiety between the team members and the family.  Trust is a two way street.  I watched families demand the school pay for summer services, private tutors and camps for their children, even when the student had made steady progress all year.  As a parent, I knew it was equally my responsibility to provide support at home for my child, so I hired a tutor, spent extra time working on what my son’s teachers sent home and attended conferences with them to better understand his strengths and weaknesses.  Yes, it was expensive and time-consuming, but it was what I felt I needed to do to help him succeed.  It cannot all fall on the school, it has to be a shared responsibility with the family.

Unfortunately, it is rare that anyone speaks up in these meetings with advocates and attorneys to ask what the parent is doing to support these skills too. I have seen parents and attorneys berate SLPs and teachers at these meetings in a manner that they would never tolerate being spoken to, and barely anyone bats an eye. Why? Fear keeps us quiet, no one wants to be a target in these meetings.  I wish I had been braver to speak up more often in these meetings.  It is a slippery slope to try to get the family on board with working together, when all they hear is “no” and their legal support labels us as bad teachers and SLPs, since we clearly do not want to help the child.   This is typically the point the meeting is at a standstill and everyone is feeling crummy.

My former boss has an amazing way of staying calm and refocusing the team on finding solutions to problems in these difficult meetings. Sometimes this resolved the issues quickly, sometimes not, but we always knew she had our back.  She took a lot of verbal abuse on our behalf with extraordinary grace in these meetings, and not once did I see her react or retaliate.  Attacking and disrespecting the people working with your child is not okay. Talk to us and help us understand your concerns and answer your questions, we really are on the same team and want your child to succeed!  I think it goes back to the basic social premise of thinking about how our words and actions make other people feel and should be the golden rule in meetings. Treat others the way you would want to be treated.

How do you handle difficult meetings?  How do involve your families in carryover and support? Share here!

Watch your tone!

Voice is an area of communication that I have really had to step up my game recently. Many of my students with autism spectrum disorders struggle with the subtleties of understanding that it’s not just the words they say, but how they say them, that convey meaning.  I love using videos to teach many social concepts and tone of voice is one of these areas, but I also needed some step by step materials to explain the why of this skill. Have you had any friends that speak like a robot or a cartoon character, or use a loud, angry tone of voice all the time (even when they weren’t mad)?  Me too!

I ended up making what I needed after looking around for months, and voila’, Voxbots (get it?) was born and you can find it in my TPT store!  I tend to be a linear thinker and know that my kids need to understand the steps and the why before we can practice and start to change these skills.   I begin with teaching cards to describe each clue we need to consider, in order to determine the right tone of voice. These clues include matching emotion to words, reading body language and facial expressions, determining the right place, time and people, and adjusting our volume, speed and inflection.  It always amazes me when I break down a skill, how complex each one is and how neurotypical brains work effortlessly when we communicate.  It also helps me understand and empathize at how hard these skills are for my students with social language deficits!

I then have task cards for each of the clue areas to practice the skills.  After we get the instructional understanding down in therapy, I give homework using a checklist of what to look for. I ask them to observe the clues in real time at home, across people and settings.  We also use video clips to look for the clues and to see if the tone of voice matches what is going on in the movie or commercial (you can look through my Pinterest board for social video clips HERE ).  Using an ipad or iphone to record the students is another great idea to generalize the skill. My students often have the most difficult time watching themselves, so I save this practice until last.  Remember, social communication in real time is a very fast moving, complex skill for all of us.  This is not a once and done lesson.  You may scaffold the skills over several weeks and then re-visit them throughout the year in therapy to probe for generalization or to see where the kids are missing clues.  You can even create a bulletin board with their Voxbots as a visual cue in the classroom or send them home as a reminder for carryover.

How do you teach tone of voice skills in therapy?  Share here!

Apples and Oranges.

I attend a large church and we are fortunate to have a couple of classes for our kids with special needs to join while their parents go to services.  I volunteer in one of these classes, and I have come to know and love the children in my room.  Several of these friends are former students of mine as well, so it is a treat to see them changing and growing into young adults!  I am in the younger classroom, and we join a larger group of K-2nd graders for a whole group dance party/bible lesson for part of our morning.

Some of my friends can be a little loud and wiggly, and at first, it stressed me out a bit to try to make sure they were not distracting the other kids during our big group time.  But as I looked around, the other students were equally (if not more) loud and wiggly!  They are being kids, in all their silly glory that comes along with not being concerned about what others think of you.  I learned to relax and enjoy the fun of watching these littles worship with wild abandon and joy!

A few weeks ago, I noticed two little girls watching one of my students sing and dance. They stared at her and then looked at me.  I walked over and asked if they wanted to come meet my friend. They were shy but said yes, and walked over.  The girls chatted for a bit and soon were jumping and singing right next to her, three peas in a pod.  The world will tell us that we are different and separate, not enough and too much, apples and oranges.   But don’t listen to the world, fruit salad is delicious!