Children's Social Skills
Children with communication problems may have difficulties with a range of social skills. Some of these are:
- Eye contact
- Physically approaching others to initiate communication
- Appropriate physical contact
- Greetings
- Asking / answering questions
- Understanding friendships
- Understanding social visits – shopping, hairdressers, library etc
- Reading body language and talking with emotional content
- Interpretation of speech
- Reading between the lines in conversation (taking things literally)
- Understanding social cues – verbal and non-verbal
Teaching social skills can be difficult to teach, and will often take many trials before they are mastered. So where can you start? Here’s a few ideas:
Greetings:
A good place to start is with your own verbal behaviour. When you have, or work with a child who does not respond to greetings, it is easy to get out of the habit of using greetings.
Make a point of using greetings each day – you can exaggerate these by using pictures or greeting songs. Try to engage eye contact – greet down at the child’s level and remember to have a happy face!
If your child is not yet comfortable with face-to-face greetings, start with pictures of each other or make puppets.
Asking and answering questions:
Start with basic personal questions, such as: What’s your name? How old are you?
You can prompt the answers to these or use pictures of your child and their age number until your child can answer the question.
Emotions:
You can begin teaching the names of emotions with labelling or selecting basic pictures. Start with happy and sad as these are the most common.
You can print emotions pictures ? use them as colouring pages, or reduce them and laminate for language cards.
Mix these with pictures of different faces from magazines and photographs.
You can make a collage of happy and sad pictures with events that provoke these emotions – such as: Birthday, a hug, party, swimming, playing, a broken toy, someone being told off, falling over.
Top of page.---Go to Homepage.
Social Scenes:
Try to get out and about with your camera when teaching about the places and community services you use.
There are many social scenes to teach (Hospital and healthcare visits have their own section), here’s an example of teaching how people receive letters.
Choose a person your child would like to write or send a picture to. Go to the post office to get a stamp and let them put it in the post box. Explain what happens next and how it gets delivered to the other person. Call them ahead of time and ask them to respond by post.
Write your own Social Stories:
When making your own social stories, it is important to be thorough but simple with details – try writing your own by answering these ‘Wh’ questions that can be applied to most situations:
- WHERE are we going?
- WHEN are we going?
- WHY are we going there?
- WHAT are we / you going to do there?
- WHO will we / you meet?
- HOW will we get there?
- What will happen after?
Click here for social skills colouring pages.
Example: Going to School
- Where are we going? To school.
- When are we going? In the morning / after breakfast.
- Why do we go to school? To learn, and make friends.
- What are we going to do there? Play, colour and listen to stories.
- Who will you meet? Your teacher and friends.
- How will we get there? In the car.
- What will happen after? I will collect you and we’ll go home to play.
Click here for our going to school visual timetable.
Teaching resources for the basic social skills are few and far between, many are too advanced and complex for pre-schoolers.
'Hello' and 'How Are You?' are Social Skills educational CDs designed to be just right.
Click here to learn about 'Hello'---Click here to learn about 'How Are You?'
