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!

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!

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!

What’s a Popplet?

It sounds like a cute Saturday morning cartoon character or a yummy pastry, but Popplet is actually an interactive graphic organizer app! It’s available on itunes but I am lucky enough to have it as part of my Office 365 suite on my school computer!  This app is described on their  website : “In the classroom and at home, students use Popplet for learning. Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them.”  My students, especially my students with social language impairments, ADD and/or executive function impairments, are definitely visual learners! I am too, so here is a link to a youtube video that shows how to build a Popplet organizer.  Here is a link to a fabulous education blog that outlines multiple uses for Popplet in school with a great step by step tutorial.   One of my SLPeeps (thanks Joy!) introduced me to this in a presentation recently and my mind jumped right to social language concepts (I know, it’s an obsession)!

How cool would this be to use for social mapping?  You could add a picture of the problem scenario in the middle (or even have the students role play problems and take actual pictures of them to use with the app).  Then, use the organizer to build out expected/unexpected pathways (you can color code them too) and tease out how their choices impact how others think and feel.  If your students have tablets in your school system as ours do, you can push out the Popplet to them individually and they have an immediate visual social map to refer to.

What about our friends who have difficulty with group work?  Building a Popplet together might be more enticing to my students who love technology and sneak in some collaborative learning skills at the same time in the therapy setting or in the classroom!  I can see this being used to work on expanding social language concepts such as perspective taking using a graphic organizer, connecting the concepts of think/say/feel and even linking shades of emotions using Popplet.  I want to try it out and have my kids look at a picture in the middle, then identify and connect the clues they see in order to make a smart guess!   It would be fantastic to be able to print a screenshot and blow it up to poster size to refer to in your therapy room or classroom too.

I am excited to try out this new therapy tool and see how it goes.  Have you used Popplet? Please share your thoughts here.  If not, how would you use it for social language therapy?

Better late than never.

I had the opportunity to work with a young adult who was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.  Evaluation at this age is tricky, as some of the standardized tests that we use in the schools age out at 17-11.  It is not uncommon for my students who are on the autism spectrum to come to their diagnosis rather late, especially if they are higher functioning and doing well academically.  They are often diagnosed as having ADHD, sensory integration disorder, mood disorders, sleep disorders and/or learning disabilities first.  These can exist co-morbidly in some people with ASD and it is difficult to tease apart one from the other.  I ran across this great blog written by a woman diagnosed with ASD at age 36, that really spoke to me regarding the topic of later diagnosis.

After testing my student with a few standardized measures, the meat of the evaluation was done using a variety of non-standardized tools such as the Double Interview from Social Thinking ®,  direct observation, conversation with the parents, gaining feedback from the teachers, giving parts of the Informal Social Assessment from Super Power Speech and utilizing the Social Language Development Test-Adolescent for information only (as the student was older than 18 and norms end at 17-11).  A standardized test score from the supra-linguistic portion of the CASL or the social checklist and activities on the CELF 5 will yield some good information, however my higher functioning students can do these highly structured tasks well but still struggle socially in the fast, ever changing day to day applications.   I find that the non-standardized pieces truly give you a better picture of the person’s social skills and social competency, and the resulting narrative is much more descriptive than a standard score.

I came across a treasure trove of articles on the Social Thinking® website, including a three part series on transitioning into adulthood for people on the spectrum and another about including the young adult as part of their planning team when working on social language competencies.  Explaining what social language is and how having ASD impacts our social relationships with others is so important for the family as well as the person with ASD, especially when a diagnosis has come later in life after many challenges.  I also really like the website Wrong Planet , as it is created and hosted by 3 young adults on the spectrum.  It has great content that connects with many young adults, such as finding and keeping a job, dating, and post-secondary education options.  I also love the blog series by Autism Classroom News on teaching the Hidden Rules curriculum and how understanding these rules are crucial to keeping our students and young adults with ASD employed and even out of legal trouble.

We need to consider how to support our students exiting public school with later diagnosis of ASD and help them transition successfully into early adulthood.  What resources have you found to help with this transition?  Share here!

 

 

Puzzle it out.

This time of year is the perfect storm.  IEP season is in full swing, Spring break is just around the corner (woohoo) and everyone is feeling a bit squirmy and squirrelly (including the SLP).  I like to have a variety of therapy options to keep my kids engaged, but my budget is tight right now.  I looked in my magic cabinet of therapy materials to see what I could add to my bag of tricks that wouldn’t elicit groans of “no, not that.”   I spotted a shiny metal box that contained a 30 piece Star Wars themed puzzle and knew I hit the jackpot!

Really, a puzzle?  You put it together and it’s done, boring.  Well, yes, it can be if you use it exactly like that.  How about using the puzzle pieces as a therapy activity to work on gestalt thinking with your social learners?   Show a piece at a time (without showing a picture of the final product) and have them make smart guesses as to what the puzzle might be. Have any friends that focus on the unimportant details and miss the big picture?  Me too, and this is harder for them than you would think!  Add in a little group work razzle dazzle and your students will be working together to problem solve putting the picture together (without a model).  You are embedding the Social Thinking® concepts of turn taking, sharing personal space, regulating emotions (when the pieces don’t fit quite right), thinking with your eyes and sticking with a group plan!

Working on non-verbal skills? Have your students put the puzzle together without talking. They have to watch each other, use gestures and pay attention to cues that it’s their turn to put their puzzle piece in.  For our students with impulsivity or difficulty with emotional regulation, this might be challenging!  Start with short, easy puzzles to help them feel successful and build resilience in these skills.

With younger students or students working at an early social cognitive level,  you can use wooden puzzles with several pieces.  I use the puzzle pieces as a template to cut out pictures from magazines or google images that fit a theme. For example, I might cut out pictures of candy, pumpkins, costumes, October on a calendar and a bat.  Then I ask the students to take turns removing the puzzle pieces to reveal the clues and  make a guess as to what all these pictures are talking about (Halloween).  You can scaffold the picture clues from easy to more difficult as they develop this skill.

Reinforce conversational turn taking by giving each student a few puzzle pieces, with you providing a topic of discussion.  As each student adds a comment or connected question to the conversation, they get to add a piece of the puzzle.  Start with large piece puzzles at first (8-10 pieces) and as your students get the hang of this, add more pieces and change topics within the conversation. You could also choose puzzles that are areas of high interest for your students (Star Wars, Super Mario Brothers, Legos, Dinosaurs) and use the puzzle pieces as reinforcers for maintaining topic during therapy. They earn a piece of the puzzle each time you catch them keeping their brain in the group (or whatever social concept you are working on that day).  If you can’t find a puzzle that matches an area of interest (guinea pigs, for example) just find a google image of said interest, print, laminate and cut into puzzle pieces, voila’!  Make sure you leave a few minutes at the end of the session for the student to put the puzzle together.

Do you use puzzles in social language therapy?  Share your ideas here!

 

 

 

Slow and Steady…

I happened to see this little snail moving along at its own pace, determined to get wherever it was going and not following a straight path.  It’s a fair representation of social language therapy from my experience.  Social language development isn’t like any other developmental acquisition timeline, such as language, articulation or gross motor skills. It doesn’t scaffold skills vertically like other areas of communication, one building upon another, leading to proficiency. I think that is part of the reason that it’s so difficult for parents, teachers and therapists to get a handle on what social language therapy is (and isn’t).

The students that I work with often have several preliminary diagnosis before they are identified as having a social language disorder (usually adhd, anxiety, or language delay). These diagnosis can and often do exist right along with social language deficits. Some of my students also have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, most often at the high end of the spectrum.  They tend to be identified later for social language intervention, as typically their academic grades are fantastic.  It is when behaviors start to occur that make these students stand out from their peers, that a referral is urgently made.    When I test these students (some as early as K-1, others not until high school), I find it’s really important to provide some good background knowledge on what social language skills are, and what the goal of therapy is for this student, to the family and the team working with them.  I love this visual of Social Thinking’s ® Social Learning Tree to help me explain the scope and sequence of social learning visually.  So many families will say their goal for therapy is  that they want their child to have friends, but there are so many prerequisite skills that need to be addressed before they are able to develop successful friendships (a very high level social competency)!

A critical piece of this discussion is talking about how social skills are developing at each level of the tree (roots to leaves) but that students don’t necessarily move upwards through all the social levels to higher social competencies, regardless of their age.  This is a difficult conversation but so crucial in starting therapeutic intervention with realistic expectations.  Just as we cannot therapize an increase in IQ , we cannot therapize social cognition to increase beyond the person’s abilities.  What we can do however,  is deepen and broaden the skills, strategies and competencies within the abilities the person does have.  We do this through direct instruction (our kids are not incidental social learners), modeling, practice and lots of feedback.  I try to reinforce the idea that social learning is a life skill, and we need to work on these skills just like we would for sports, music or academics.

This is not a fast process and it’s often hard to understand a person’s perspective, motivation and deep understanding about how they fit and function in the social framework of their life.  It cannot just be the SLP working on these skills.  It has to involve the family, teachers (general ed as well as special ed), school staff, counselors, OT,  and peer mentors (read a great article about this here from Social Thinking).  Moving the skills and strategies from direct instruction in the speech room, to a structured and supportive setting such as a counseling group or small class, and then learning to generalize the skills across people, place and time is the long-term road map.  It may take several years to develop these social skills and successfully demonstrate social competency. There will be stumbles and mistakes, but that’s okay. It’s part of being human and none of us (even neurotypical adults) are perfect at this social life all the time! Social growth and success are possible, but it is slow and steady intervention that wins this race.

Don’t change the channel!!

While my team did not win (congrats, Pats fans!), the Super Bowl offered a dazzling and sparkly half time show with Lady Gaga and a few commercial gems I added to my Pinterest social video board.  There was a plethora of video game ads and upcoming TV show teasers, but not a lot of memorable commercials for me this year.  Anyone else think that the Humpty Dumpty ads were kind of creepy?

I love to use video clips in social language therapy to work on the Social Thinking® concepts of expected/unexpected behaviors, connecting what someone says to what others are thinking or feeling, making predictions/smart guesses and more!  Many of my kids can do this with a static picture or social scenario read to them, but in real time, not so much! Social language is fluid and fast, making it hard for my kids to keep up with the processing of language and non-verbal interpretation with their peers.  Video clips (keep them short) are a great stepping stone towards real time application of the social competencies you are working on!

I have shared some videos on the blog previously, so you can check them out here if you want to add them to your video repertoire:  Doritos in Speech? Score!  ,  That’s Awkward and Puppies, Predictions and Cars .  You can use my free football themed social language commercial freebie from my TPT store HERE to analyze the components of each commercial with your kids. You can also create your own lessons with video clips and embedded questions that you create using Playposit (read all about how to use that fabulous free resource)!

Here are a few more that you will want to check out from this year, if you missed them because you left to grab a snack….or cry (I still love you Falcons!):

Skittles at the Window boyfriend

Cam Newton Buick 

or this trio of Kia videos with Melissa McCarthy:

Hero Journey

Penguin Problem

Iceberg car

Gronk’s Cleaners

Hawaiian Rolls

 Any that I might have missed that you loved (or hated)?   Share here!

 

 

My Social Calendar.

 

I loved the Kindness calendars that were floating around Facebook and Pinterest this holiday season, but why should kindness only be on the calendar during December?  So I made my own “social calendar” for January (you can click on the link below to print your own).   I tried to add ideas for my students to challenge themselves to stretch a bit socially this month, including adding some volunteer/service ideas.   You can make your own personalized version, if you have Powerpoint (the calendar templates for a whole year are available for free and you can add/edit to your heart’s desire). I’d love if you would share your calendar creations too!

I may make one to encourage my introverted self to step out a bit more in the social world this year too!  Happy New Year to you and hope to see you back here soon…

Heidi

Print your free copy here:  january-social-calendar