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!

 

 

 

 

 

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!

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!

 

 

 

The Truth Hurts.

 

I have had several students whose problem is being honest. The problem itself isn’t honesty, it’s the degree, timing and audience of that honesty that gets them into trouble. We have set ourselves up a bit with reinforcing gems such as “honesty is the best policy” and “always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. For our students with ASD who can see rules such as these as black and white, truth can become problematic. To make this concept a little trickier, the world of social media that we live in seems to market the misconception that we have to put it all out there.  I often read blogs that state a brutal “truth” and then try to soften it with , “I’m not saying, I’m just saying…”.  The southern version of this is to make a blunt comment and follow it with “Bless their heart.”

I have worked with several high school students (all boys btw) who regularly got into trouble with their teachers and peers for their unfiltered truths. They would protest after seriously insulting a classmate’s choice of clothing or publicly questioning their teacher’s IQ with ,”I’m just being honest.” Therein lies the problem.  So how do we address this topic? We want to support the idea that honesty is a positive characteristic in people and one that is desirable in a healthy society. But we also need to do is talk about the degree of honesty in relation to other people’s feelings. Being honest does not mean you say everything that you think, and a social filter is critical when you live in community with others. We also need to consider if the timing is right to comment, what our relationship is to the people around us (friends, family, teachers, strangers), and if we were asked to offer our opinion or not.

As an example, I remember working with a very, very bright young man with ASD, who received an F on his paper about his personal views on religion. In our conversation, I asked if he had followed the rubric and had talked with the teacher after receiving the grade to figure out why he had failed. He responded that of course he followed the “rubric so ridiculous that even a simple-minded monkey could do it!” He then went on to say that he spoke to his teacher. “I told her she was obviously too old and stupid to understand what I was saying”,he fumed.   He perceived that was the reason why he received a F. Oh boy.

We worked the next few sessions on talking about his perception of the situation and how his teacher may have perceived his comments using a point of view organizer. It hadn’t dawned on him that he may have hurt her feelings (and that his assumption had been completely wrong). When I brought up this possibility, he responded with, “But I thought it was true. I was just being honest.” It took a few weeks to get him to even consider that there were other options, more effective options, that he could try next time that may actually benefit him. We continued to work through different social scenarios to practice these skills and while it wasn’t automatic with him, he could at least consider the impact of his words and begin to modify some of the negative behaviors.

I have created this TPT visual (which would make a great classroom poster!)  to talk about being truthful here