Diary of a Social Detective

Well today was a wonderful day!  I ordered a few books about 1 month ago & they finally arrived!  I almost kissed the delivery driver, but since I thought it would violate a few social morays, I didn't.  Afterall the books I was waiting for were dealing with social skills. 

The book I was most excited about was this glorious one...

 

I have been on the hunt for a while for a book to use in a social skills group.  I have read tons of reviews and was going back and forth between this one and SuperFlex.  I chose this one over SuperFlex because I thought it was more appropriate for my older students.  The premise of this book is that Johnny is a young man who used to be socially awkward, but applied to his detective skills to help him navigate the social maze.  Now that he is socially aware, he runs a detective business whereby he helps his not-so-knowledgable peers discover why they are less socially adept.  It provides a story to support a social scenario & then he and his peer develop solutions to the problem. 

 

The author even has a website where students can write in with their own scenarios:

 

    www.socialdetectives.com

 

My book is already flagged up with stickies & notes.  I have been furiously working on how my group is going to run.  I am a bit nervous about the whole thing, as I have never run a "social skills" group before.  I mean, outside of my autistic classroom.  Somehow this feels completely different, but I am really excited about it. 

 

While I was waiting for my book to arrive, I tried to find some activites to correspond to the book like people have for SuperFlex, but I guess since it is a book for higher level students there isn't much out there.  So today I worked on a few.  At the end of the book, there are questions that can be answered for each chapter that is read.  I took the questions and made a "worksheet".  I am also not planning on reading the book chapter by chapter.  I am starting with the most appropriate chapter for my group, which happens to be about excessive talking & misreading body language (a lot of the chapters deal with misreading body language).  This is what I have come up with so far, but I haven't used it with a group yet, so I am sure that I have some tweaking to do yet.

 

 



 I also created this page to help us with body language interpretation.

(This one is on BoardmakerShare.com)

 



I plan to begin our group sessions once we return from Spring Break.  In the meantime, I hope everyone is enjoying warm weather, because it was cold and snowy here today!