Shark Bites.

With two boys of my own, Shark Week has always been a big hit around my house.  It’s coming around again this month for 2016 and we will be sure to watch!  I have seen some really cute craftivities on sharks that I will be using with my summer kiddos including these great ideas from Sunflower Storytime  and their free shark mouth template PDF !

 

I was thinking about how to apply Shark Week fun to social language concepts using the shark mouth pdf, and I came up with this:

I printed the shark outline on cardstock and laminated it to make it more durable.  Next, I put stick on velcro dots along the edge of the mouth (you could use tape, glue or even lay it flat and just put the teeth along the edges.  I used Word and copied as many triangles onto the page as I could since the pdf only had one tooth that I used for sizing.  Then I printed the teeth out on card stock and cut them out before the activity.  This activity is appropriate for late elementary ages on up but could be simplified for younger kids too.

Before making our shark mouths, we talked about how “sharp” words can be (just like shark teeth).  They can cut and wound people when we are being mean or not using our social filters (think it vs. say it).  I asked the kids to share some words that would be hurtful to them or the people that they care about, and we called them shark bites. We brainstormed on a white board first to talk it through. I like to have a visual model (Sarah Ward’s executive function workshop opened my eyes to beginning with the end visually for our kids), but I don’t want them to copy exactly what I have written.  BTW, I always have that one kid who tells me, “I don’t care what people say about me”, so we talk about it from a cartoon character’s perspective instead (Sponge Bob and Squidward are great examples).  This is a little easier for some of my students with ASD, to talk about difficult subjects or feelings from someone else’s experience, not their own.

We also practice sorting out teeth that I have written on prior to the lesson, onto thought bubbles and talking bubbles.   This is a great companion activity to work on the concept of not saying everything that we are thinking, because it can be hurtful.  I extend this concept to include the idea that just because something is “true” doesn’t mean that it is okay to say it, if it hurts someone.

That’s how we are diving in deep during social skills shark week!  How are you incorporating sharks into your themed therapy (social skills or otherwise)? Share here!

 

 

 

Puppies, Prediction and Cars…

I am a dog lover, so when puppy commercials come on TV, I get drawn in immediately. Subaru has a series of car commercials airing now that just suck me in. every. single. time.  They feature a family of Golden Retrievers (The Barkleys!) and their adventures in driving. There are no words in the commercials (duh, they are dogs) BUT they convey a message in each one very clearly. For my students with social language impairments, too much language muddies the processing waters, so these are perfect!  I have downloaded the series onto my social language Youtube channel playlists HERE .

Beyond the complete cuteness overload, they are fabulous tools to work on the social language concepts of predicting and inferencing for my students!  The eight commercials convey social scenarios (for example: the mom getting her hair done) and are great to use to identify emotions, prediction, point of view and humor, all in about thirty seconds. Don’t forget about expected and unexpected concepts too (a puppy in a car seat-whaaaat?). These would be great to use with Playposit (you can read my blog post on how to create your own therapy activity by embedding questions into video clips HERE ).

Do you use commercials to teach inferences or other social language concepts?  I love using Dorito’s Super Bowl ads  and kid’s movie previews!  Please share your favorites here!

Use Your B.R.A.I.N.S!

I spent the past week at a fun crossroad; posting on the SLP Materials Club facebook page as a guest AND enjoying a hot, fun week at the beach with my family!  It was the perfect respite after a long school year and I even got to read a WHOLE BOOK with my toes in the ocean (“A Man Called Ove”, a fabulous funny/sad summer read that I highly recommend). As we were walking along the Sebastian Inlet, I saw this little piece of coquina rock that frequents the coast where I grew up:

The words “rock brain” popped into my thought bubble immediately! Do you see why I needed a vacation?!  Anyway, as part of my SLP Materials Club week, I posted a new freebie from my TPT store.  I created it to use with my students to work on how we engage other people and show that we are thinking about them.   It includes a flip book for an interview of another person to practice the skills, teaching cards to talk about how we use our brains to think about other and a teaching poster to review the acronym B.R.A.I.N.S. (we SLPs do so love our acronyms). The poster would be perfect to enlarge and hang up in your therapy room, classroom or as part of a fun bulletin board!  What does this acronym stand for?  I’m so glad you asked!

B- Be present in the moment

R-Remain on topic

A-Actively listen

I-Interpret Accurately

N-Non-verbals are important

S-Seek information

You can download this social language freebie HERE .  I know you want to give your brain a rest too and not think about school for a bit, but go ahead and file this away for the Fall now!  Happy Summer!

Recess Rules!!!

I don’t know about you, but with two weeks of school left, we are all a bit squirrelly!  You can feel the end is near and it’s making everyone a bit crazy and cranky, kids and adults alike.  Recess is a saving grace and the promise of EXTRA recess will motivate even the most active kids to focus and work a little harder.  I sit in a LOT of IEP meetings throughout the year, and recess comes up often for my friends with social language issues.  Unstructured times, like recess, are often the wild west of hidden rules for these kiddos.  You will either see them walking the perimeter of the playground on their own or trying to join in, but in unexpected and unwelcome ways.

I found several videos on Youtube that explain the rules of recess, from the teacher and student point of view.  You can find them on my Youtube channel under social play modeling  or on my social videos Pinterest board.  Many schools have adopted PBIS  (positive behavior intervention and supports) to address the “rules of the schools”.  PBIS often addresses recess and playground behavior specifically, so how great would it be to make your own school video or school posters to talk about the rules of recess?  You could brainstorm with your students about the rules (both spoken and hidden rules) of recess and then have them teach their peers through a video.  Talk with your administration and media specialist about sharing the videos at school; we have morning announcements that show on TVs in all the classrooms.  Bonus:  it’s a great way to work on tone of voice, volume, orienting your body towards to camera, thinking with your eyes and more social concepts that your student may be working on, as you film them!  Don’t forget to get parent permission first!

To further this concept, what about making videos to show how to join into games, ask other kids to play or even how to play certain games, like rock, paper, scissors ? Remember, our kids are not incidental learners, so breaking down the steps to play may seem too basic, but it’s often where we need to start!  We also know there are students that could benefit from this visual support that don’t have IEPs , but still struggle socially at recess.  I bet you could get a LOT of buy in from your counselor, other special education teachers and therapists in your school for a great project!  Think about tapping into Donor’s Choose to apply for funds for a great video camera and editing software too.

How do you support your students at recess?  Share here!

Rolling Safari…

One of my new and very creative SLPs in my county, Marjie, showed a Rolling Safari video in a group lesson last week.  Apart from being hilarious, they are the perfect videos to work on lots of social language concepts.  I have pinned a bunch of them to my Youtube channel as well as my Pinterest Social Video board, so please feel free to take a look and pin away!!

The Rolling Safari videos were actually developed for a short animation contest  but their social language application is so much fun!   The concept is to take animals that you would see on safari and enlarge their shapes until they look more like balloons in the Macy’s Day parade (or me after eating a burrito).  The students in the speech group I observed kept laughing at how odd the animals looked and moved in the videos.   This absurdity lends itself to a great way to work on talking about social language concepts including:

Expected/Unexpected

Prediction

Cause/Effect   (great for how and why questions for older students)

Compare/Contrast

Making a smart guess/inferences

What the other animals might be thinking, feeling or saying

Imagining/Wondering (what if…)

It might be fun to extend the concepts with a motor piece and have the students lay on top of a big therapy ball to move across a mat.  You could set up plastic safari animals on the mat to make their own Rolling Safari!  This movement can give language and experience to what the animals in the videos are feeling in their unexpected shape and size!  You can work in turn taking, imagination and self regulation skills into this activity for a fun way to spend the day on a rolling speech social language safari!

An End of the Year Treat!

 

 

It’s almost the end of the school year and TPT is having a BIG sale as a treat May 3rd-4th!  I wanted to share a few goodies from my store as well as my wish list items that will be added to my own cart!!  Don’t forget to use the code CELEBRATE at checkout for additional savings! Happy shopping. I am linking up with SLPRunner and The Frenzied SLPs for a sale linky, so make sure you click through for more great product suggestions!

 

You might want to snap up a few things from my store like my Lucky Duck! Social Skills game on winning and losing and a few for the start of the year, like my That’s Sick social skills unit on germs and hygiene (game, story, puzzles and a flip book are included).  My Social Skills Squish Bundle is seven different play doh mats, scenarios and extension ideas to practice social language concepts (and a great value)!!

Now what I am super excited to pick up from my fellow SLPeeps this week?  Take a peek …

I love to make up new games to play with my students (or have them come up with their own rules and ideas!) and this game board clipart from Peachie Speechie is perfect!  I can use these games with some of her fun activity sets  like these Social Skills Deck cards. Print and Go FUN for these crazy weeks!!

Full disclosure:  I already own and LOVE this product!  However, it’s on my wishlist for one of my CFs (shhhhh).  Speech Paths has done it again with this engaging social language activity pack that is a fun way to work on hard social concepts with my elementary students.

Speech Time Fun saves the day with a print and go social skills gold mine for my older students!  I am looking forward to trying it out this summer and then recommending it to my middle school CFs in the Fall!

Space themed AND social skills fun?  Done, done and done!  I am excited to grab this fun social language game from Jenn Alcorn.  My boys will LOVE it!

Anyone have blurters out there?   ME TOO!   I can’t wait to try this activity from Badger State Speechy to help my friends work on not interrupting using stories, activities and visual supports, SCORE!

What’s in YOUR cart???

It was just a little lie…

Some of my students have a problem, they don’t always tell the truth.  They not only fib, tell whoppers and embellish, sometimes they straight up lie to my face.   Telling the truth vs. telling a lie is a pretty black and white concept; it is a rule we are taught from the time we started talking.  However, lying can fall into the gray area of social rules and it’s a difficult thing to explain to kids with social language impairments!

For my younger elementary students, I really like  “Howard B. Wigglebottom and the Monkey on His Back” and Julia Cook’s book, “Lying Up a Storm” to start a discussion.  It’s often so much easier to talk about difficult subjects in the frame of what someone else did, rather than addressing it directly with the student’s behaviors.

 

 

As a general rule, people should not lie.   There are times however, when what is often called a “white lie” might be necessary to protect someone’s feelings.   This discussion requires an understanding of perspective taking and being able to put yourself “in someone else’s shoes”.  My older students will often try to excuse a rude or blunt comment with “I’m just being honest” or “But it’s the truth!”,  regardless of how what they said made someone feel or think.  To steal a phrase from them, not cool, not cool at all.  As you can see, talking with our students about lying can be a slippery slope!

I really like these TPT activities to start a discussion on the concepts of thinking about others and how not being honest impacts them (and what they think about us when we lie):

Types of Lies Town (a teachable game for late elementary students)

Half Truths Social Skills Conversation Starter (freebie)

Truth Monitor (classroom poster and teaching tool)

What other resources do you use to work on honesty and lying?   Share here!

 

Get to the point!

I was chatting with a colleague the other day about one of our favorite students.  She is a fifth grader with high functioning ASD and she has come a long way in so many of her social communication skills!  One area she continues to struggle in is giving too much information in conversation.  She understood the steps to check in visually with the listener (non-verbals) and what she should do , but she continued to give way too much information day to day.   I have a freebie on TPT to help with these beginning steps of determining how much information is too much or too little that she used very successfully (you can download it HERE).  She could often recognize too much detail when other people did it, but like many of our students, she needed more support with her own self-monitoring.

Her SLP and I brainstormed a couple of ideas to try,  including giving her a time constraint to share relevant information/responses.  15 seconds doesn’t sound very long, but it sure feels long if someone is rambling on and on without reaching a point.  A visual timer was introduced, but the student got flustered trying to organize her thoughts to fit the time limit (hello executive function!).  So her very smart SLP, Jaime, had her use a graphic organizer to put down her thoughts prior to the timed activity.

This was a great way to help her visually see the important pieces of information that she needed to include or the unimportant details that might bog her down (and she was more successful)!  This graphic organizer idea goes along nicely with how schools often teach writing to our kids, a main idea, 3 supporting details and a concluding sentence, and is a framework to help our students learn to summarize and condense their thoughts. You could even give your students five tickets representing each part of the re-tell as visual support. Obviously, this is not something that will happen in natural conversation, however, we often have to break down the skill and practice from model towards independence.  This is tricky for lots of our students on the spectrum, with ADD or with executive function weaknesses, so lots of practice in the therapy room AND in real time is essential (get mom and dad on board at home and the classroom teachers/peers using these strategies too for generalization).

Another idea I had was to give her a visual representation of information.  Use a bag (like one from a party store) and put in objects to represent information on a topic. For example, a movie ticket, popcorn, an empty drink cup, a picture of the movie, all in the bag.  Ask the student to decide if there is enough information/detail in the bag to understand what the topic is.  Then explain that the bag is really our brain.  You can put in one object (not enough) or lots of extraneous objects (representing off topic or unimportant details) to visually represent conversational responses.

You could also have your other students (artic monitoring anyone?) record short videos giving examples of conversational responses and have your student identify if it’s too much, not enough or just the right amount of information. If the example has too much information, see if the student can identify which comments were extraneous or redundant to make it a little harder.   To further extend this idea, your students working on this skill might enjoy making their own cartoons and they can record the responses using Toontastic, a free app on itunes.   This is great for feedback when discussing if they gave the right amount of information to a new listener.

How do you help your students give responses with just the right amount of information? Share here!

 

I’m so NOT a groupie.

In working with students on the autism spectrum, one issue that seems to continue to pop up is working in groups successfully.  Collaborative learning is woven throughout the core from my itty bitties to high school.   I really like the tower of building blocks poster, from Michelle Garcia Winner’s Incredible Flexible You ,  that illustrates all the steps required to be part of a group.

There are 14 skills that are necessary to do this effectively. Fourteen including joint attention, joint intention, imitation, attachment and emotional engagement, individual self regulation, language and cognition, central coherence, theory of mind, executive function, perspective taking (sharing space with others), self regulation in a group, cooperation and negotiation, collaborative play/sharing an imagination, and then, learning in a group.  It would be a great visual to share with parents and teachers to show the complexity of what we are asking them to do.  While it is innate in a neurotypical child, these skills often need more discreet teaching, breaking down the steps and lots of practice to help them figure out how to do all the things necessary to be part of a group successfully.

By the time the students are in middle school and beyond, it becomes more evident when there are social weaknesses that impair participation and cooperation in group work. Also, our kids who don’t have these group prerequisites can often appear to be non-cooperative and difficult behaviorally (refusal, interrupting, not being able to accept a differing opinion, no social filter) rather than their class recognizing that these “behaviors” are often part of their social language impairment.  This does not endear them to their peers or teachers. They are often left to fend for themselves as a result, and this may inadvertently reinforce these behaviors to escape the group work for our kids.  It’s a miserable cycle.

I have seen some great strategies that teachers, OTs and SLPs have used to encourage moving towards successful group work.  They include letting the student choose a part of the group work to complete (on their own or with a preferred peer), recording a piece of their research or presentation on an iphone to reduce anxiety with presentation to a class, having the group present to the teacher outside of the class setting (less people, less distraction), or working in a group via technology such as group me (a group text message app that allows a back and forth group discussion), edmodo or using a google doc.  Build up the time they participate slowly and reinforce the heck out of them!!  For my older students, introducing the concept of the “social fake/boring moments” as illustrated in this fantastic poster by Social Thinking (RT) is important. This poster for working in a group is a great resource too.  We need to acknowledge sometimes we need to work, think and talk about things we really don’t care about because it’s the expected behavior in a class discussion or project (and in life).  Here is a video link to a good example of a conversational social fake (and a bad example too)  as well as a great lesson plan from Cindy Meester on talking about the social fake HERE using the curriculum from Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking (RT) program. I also really like this TPT game, Phoney Baloney, from Just Speechie SLP to work on this skill too.

Working on the prerequisite pieces, such as self regulation, having a plan of what to do/say when you disagree, sticking to the topic, and the art of negotiation are all life long skills that will build success in group work, far beyond the school years. These are critical skills for success in the workplace and in relationships as well.  Remember, the skills aren’t going to be acquired in a few speech sessions, if that were true they would have picked them incidentally a long time ago from their peers! It’s not just the SLP that needs to work on these skills either, the best outcome results from a team approach (student, family, teachers, peers, OT, counselor, etc..) and a lot of structured opportunity.  I like to think about social language development as more of a crock pot than a microwave.

What strategies have you found work well in group work in the classroom for your students?

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a Spring Social!!

Spring has sprung in Atlanta (ah-choo!) and I have gathered some of my favorite spring themed TPT social language products into my virtual Easter basket for you.  You can just click on the pictures for the links to my TPT store, SmartmouthSLP, easy peasy lemon squeasy!  These packets are all focused on social language concepts including figurative language, hidden rules, expected/unexpected behaviors, determining the best solutions, the language of emotions and much more!   There is even an April Fool’s product to help your students figure out if they are being jokey or jerkey this week (hint: jokey is the much better choice). The packets and games range from your littles all the way through materials appropriate for young adults, so I hope that you will find something that you can add to your SLP bag of tricks (there are 2 freebies included too)!

 If you have any other social language products that you LOVE, please share and add the link in the comments section.  I am always on the lookout for new materials for my students and fellow SLPs!!  Ready to find some goodies?  Let’s go!

Spring means warm weather, and that means it’s ice cream time!  Check out 31 flavors of fun here:

Looking for a little April Fool’s fun social language fun this week?  Here you go!

What’s Up Peeps? Is chock full of spring themed social language activities:

For your middle and littles…:

And a social language game for your big kids too….

Last but not least, a spring craftivity and 2 freebies for you!