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!

Social Skills

Wow!  It sure has been a LONG time since I have blogged.  I apologize for my absence, but I must say this move has been more difficult than I anticipated it being.  I thought it would be a walk in the park since I spoke the language.  Boy was I wrong!  It has taken me months to just figure out the grocery stores!  Anyway, now that I feel more comfortable, I am going to get better about blogging.

So...

I know that I posted this fall about my new job, but I haven't posted anything about what I have actually been doing. I am working with 3 students who have been identified as Aspergers and are all in a mainstreamed classroom.  One of the students I am working with is in middle school & has been working on effectively working in cooperative groups.  Another student & I are working on social interaction.  He has the skills to interact with his peers, but as he says, "I just don't see why I have to play with other kids.  I like myself."  My third student is working on task completion and classroom participation.

I have been doing a wide variety of things with the kids I have been working with because they are all at different points in their AU lives.  I am working in much more of a therapist role, although if I am being honest, I still don't really feel as comfortable in this role as in my previous role.  I am hoping that blogging about my new job will help me sort myself out and help me become just as comfortable in this role.

First things first...

I have been using fewer picture cues and more lists & flow charts than ever before.  For my one child who likes himself, we had to develop a plan for how to approach people on the playground.  Recess at my school is very different than in the States.  Everyone, K-8, has recess at the same time two times a day.  It is wonderful, in that there are so many opportunities to interact with a variety of kids and to engage in a wider range of activities.  On the downside, it is a bit overwhelming when you don't know what to do.  This particular student didn't know how to join into a group or even how to approach someone to play. We were able to create a flow-chart to help him know what to do.  He was so funny when we were creating it, because he was very particular about how he wanted it to be color coded because the colors all had a significant meaning for him.  When he first began using the script, he was very rigid and couldn't vary the script at all; but eventually, he was able to deal with the fluctuations in responses and adapt his questions and statements. (The statements on this chart are in his own words.)

When we started to work on other ways to approach someone, he suggested that we make another flow-chart.  At one point, I think we had 5 different flow-charts on approaching people and asking to join and/or play a game!  I was so flow-charted out it was crazy, but he was so gung-ho for them I had to giggle.  Gotta love AU kiddos!