Lights, Camera, Action!

Lights, Camera, Action!.  A cumulative project for classrooms on social language concepts.

Lights, Camera, Action!

 

We are crawling towards the last week of school in my county.  When I ask everyone how they are, the response is the same,  “I’m hanging in there” they reply wearily.   There is a light at the end of this school year but we aren’t quite done.   In one of my classrooms I am working with, an amazing resource teacher has used the lesson plans, handouts, videos and activities I have given her to work on 3 areas of social language that her students struggle with including:  whole body listening, humor, and appropriate commenting.  This should frankly be a curriculum in every middle school as far as I am concerned as 99% of students struggle with these skills!

The lessons are finished for this year and this fabulous teacher mentioned how they benefited ALL of her students, not just the students with ASD (hurray!).  As Michelle Garcia Winner so aptly noted, social skills are life skills.   Everyone needs to work on these skills to get along in a world with other people!   The next step was how to wrap up these lessons.   I thought and thought. and came up with a class project (or as it is known in the Post-core-curriculum world, a “cumulative project”).   The students would create a short video on one of the three areas taught this year.  Their target audience would be other students and they would have to not only create the video but demonstrate and apply the skills they have been working on all year.   Jackpot!!  Here is the timeline of the project:

 

Week	Activity	Social area addressed	notes
April  28th	Video groups/ideas	Cooperative work in a group with peers
	Team meeting	Problem solving
	Divide responsibilities	Whole Body Listening
	Storyboard development	Perspective taking, humor
	Storyboard development	Sharing ideas, remarks and opinions appropriately
May 5	Develop script	Cooperative work in a group
	Develop script	Problem solving
	Develop script	Whole body listening
	Develop script	Perspective taking, humor
	Develop script	Sharing Ideas, remarks and opinions appropriately
May 12	Start filming videos	Cooperative work with peers
	Filming	Problem solving
	Filming	Perspective taking, humor
	Edit	Sharing ideas, remarks and opinions appropriately
	edit	Whole body listening
May 19	VIDEO SHARE in class	Whole body listening, perspective taking
	VIDEO SHARE in class	Sharing ideas, remarks and opinions appropriately
	Class vote/awards	Humor

Students will create a short video on one of the three areas of social thinking introduced this Spring

 WHOLE BODY LISTENING

SHARING IDEAS, COMMENTS or OPINIONS APPROPRIATELY

APPROPRIATE HUMOR

Students will be divided into teams and given the task of creating a  3-5 minute video about one of the three topics above.  The target audience for the video is other students.   Each team will follow the time line for dividing responsibilities, creating storyboards (ideas and pictures that represent the sequence of the video), developing a script, then filming their videos.  The last week of school, the students will show the videos to the class and vote on superlatives:  funniest, most creative, best use of theme, etc..

I am bringing the popcorn and awards for the viewing this week, and can’t wait to see how the videos turned out!  I have a sneaking suspicion that videos made by kids, for kids, will be really effective and I plan on getting permission to use them in other classes around the county.  Happy (almost) summer and I am off to the red carpet….

How have you generalized social skills into your classrooms?

 

 

You WILL Be My Friend….or else

Peter Brown’s book on friendship

 

The Scholastic Book Fair rolled into my school this week for the last hurrah before summer.   I strolled through the aisles looking for this and that when I found the book, “You Will Be My Friend” by Peter Brown.   I read the title first as “Will You Be My Friend?” but when I looked again, sure enough the title was a command not a request!   This book illustrates the difficulties of figuring out how to make friends, whether you are a beast or a boy.  For a lot of my students with social language weakness, friendship is tricky!

One of my favorite students started a conversation with a new classmate this year.  She recounted that she wanted to be friends with the new girl, so she told her, ” I am just going to warn you, you don’t want to make me mad.”  She felt that she was offering good insight on how to be her friend, just don’t make me mad.  She didn’t consider that starting off a friendship with a perceived threat was not a great first impression.  Yikes.

Lucy, the main character of our story, heads out on a mission one morning to find a new friend in the forest.   She bumbles her way into frog ponds, a giraffe’s breakfast and invades the personal space of a local ostrich.     Lucy’s intentions are good, but she struggles on her quest to find a friend.     The illustrations are beautiful and offer great clues on reading body language, emotion and what other’s might be thinking in the story.   It is filled with fantastic opportunities to talk about social language concepts such as whole body listening, personal space, talking too much and being yourself around others!

I have created a three page activity to go along with the story (factual questions and social thinking questions) here

What books have you used for friendship?