I use Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking® curriculum with many of my students. One of the concepts that is explored in this curriculum is “I have thoughts about you and you have thoughts about me.” In other words, people are always thinking about each other and they may have comfortable or uncomfortable thoughts depending on their actions. This may affect how they treat individuals in the future. People want to be with people they are comfortable with and have good thoughts about. They may avoid those that don’t make them feel comfortable. Therefore being able to tell the difference between what is expected behavior in given situations and what is unexpected can help us when making and keeping our friends. You can find more information on her concepts at http://www.socialthinking.com/
I needed a good set of task cards to review actions that students may do or observe others do. You may find them useful if you are teaching from this curriculum. They are double sided with an unexpected behavior on one side and a matching expected behavior on the other side.
I put the cards in a draw bag. The students reached in and drew a card out, and placed it on the table. They then decided if the side facing up was an expected behavior or unexpected. They talked about how the actions make them feel. If the unexpected is presented first, students can talk about what they think the expected behavior would be on the other side.
Students checked their answers by using the Top Secret UV light which I got at our book fair. I put a U or and E in the box for them to check. There is also a QR code for those who would prefer to use a scanner. My students find this motivating and they can self check if they are working in small table groups.
The draw bag is an easy thing to make. I took a sleeve off an old sweater and sewed across the bottom. The cuff makes a nice finished opening and the bag is stretchy. It has got to be the easiest bag I have ever made.
In my TPT packet, there are 28 expected cards and 28 matching unexpected cards side by side. They are meant to be printed on card stock, cut on the horizontal lines and folded back to make a double sided card. I put a box on each card so I could write with my UV light pen a U or E in the box. Students can light the answer up. I also put a QR code for those who like that option. The QR code is from http://www.qrstuff.com/. When scanned it will read expected or unexpected to correspond to the side it is on.
I am putting 2 pages of the cards below for you to review as a freebie. If you like them consider getting the full set at TPT. Just click on the cover page button at the top for a direct link to the product. Your patronage covers the cost of this website and keeps it advertisement free, except for me I suppose. I am trying to keep the commercial aspect down and provide resources. I know most of us are on really tight budgets.
Students are sometimes referred to Child Study Team (CST) because of difficulties relating to peers. Concerns revolve around the student saying inappropriate things, being picked on and starting fights on the playground. When you talk to the student, you may find they have limited interests and talk excessively on one topic. They have difficulties taking turns during a conversation. In their attempts to enter a conversation they say something that can be perceived as an insult or bragging. This results in a fight or peers not wanting to interact with them. The student then feels picked on or shunned.
Sometimes these students have a diagnosis of Aspergers or high functioning autism and are on our caseloads. They may need direct instruction on how to have a conversation. Learning the art of having a conversation can help alleviate some of the difficulties. However, it is a very difficult skill to teach without structure. Left to their own devices, the a session may go something like this. A student will start a topic of high interest to them. The other students interrupt to make off topic comments. One student dominates the topic with multiple comments until another student manages to derail to another topic with multiple comments. It becomes a competition to control the topic rather than enjoy an exchange of information. No one feels they have been listened to and arguments occur as they interrupt each other. Each student feels that only their topic and comments are right. I have actually had a student say they won because they had the most papers out.
How do we provide structure so it becomes a learning task? It is important to break down skills in in smaller increments so they can understand and practice. I have used colored paper shapes as visual cues to illustrate turn taking, topic changes and questions and comments.
Can you guess which conversation is interactive with multiple people talking about a topic. Which conversation is more likely people talking for themselves?
During this process I have discovered many of our students do not know how to start a conversation or recognize when another student is giving them an opening to start a conversation. They may not see the differences between a question and a comment and do not understand the hidden expectations of both. When a comment is said, they may misinterpret its intent and not respond appropriately. I made comment and reply cards so that my students could work on this directly. There is a full set at the TPT store. You can reach them directly by hitting the button at the top of the page or the button below.
There is also a set of trial cards here.
The need for social skills groups continues to grow at the elementary school where I teach. We had enough students to form two groups this school year. One group is made primarily of second graders and the other fourth and fifth graders. The counselor and I teach these classes together.
We have used Leah Kuypers The Zones of Regulation® (www.zonesofregulation.com) and Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking® materials for our lesson planning. Recently we have worked on identifying emotions and how they fall into the 5 zones. For a brief overview, the Zones are 5 color coded signs that rank from the lowest blue zone of low alertness which relate to being calm, or tired to the red zone of heightened alertness which relates to feelings such as anger or fear. You can click on the web sites to obtain more explicit information.
These colors and zones can also be used when talking about the size of a problem. Students determine if a problem is at the lowest level which would be a glitch in our day or at the highest level a crisis difficult to correct. Other problems may fall somewhere in between. When compared with the zones of regulation students can see if the emotional reaction is appropriate to the problem. This also leads to talking about possible solutions.
When starting this unit, I found it difficult to find appropriate scenarios for the students to rate. They came up with a few on their own but typically do not think of the full range. you would be surprised at how much comes in as being a crisis. I created 26 cards with written scenarios. I added another four blank cards that if drawn the student would make up their own. The scenarios are ones that are common to students. I used Ned’s head for drawing out cards. Ned’s head is a good way to add humor to the situation and remind students that they may be thinking and seeing from one perspective inside their head. They can step out to see another perspective and problem solve. Here are a sample of the cards. You can down load them and test them out by clicking the button below.
You can reach the the full set by clicking the button below.
I imagine some of you are wrapping up your school year and ready for a break. We still have 4 weeks to go here. I am still doing lesson planning in the middle of all those end of the year IEPs and progress reports. I can’t help thinking about last year’s contract negotiation issues which caused an unplanned for week off. This year is going much better. Looking at the bright side, I developed some strong relationships with my fellow teachers with all that walking. It paid off in my interactions this school year. This got me thinking about how bad things often have a silver lining, and how that carries us through to a better future. My inflexible thinkers often have difficulty seeing this possibility and have difficulty making a recovery when things go badly. It may be one of the most important life skills to develop. If you are using a Social Thinking Curriculum by Michelle Garcia Winner, www.socialthinking.com, it fits in well with determining “The size of the problem.”
I decided to address this ability to turn a bad thing into a good thing more directly. We’ve been using cards I made called “Bad Thing Good Thing’. I started using them with my 3rd and 4th graders who are part of a social skills group. That was tough. The inability to think flexibly was very apparent and they needed a lot of prompting to think otherwise. The 5th grader did better. I was worried that I might have created something too difficult for the age range so I brought them out for my articulation students working on sounds in conversational speech. The 3rd graders through 5th graders were able to do them without prompting and pretty automatically. I concluded that these cards were very telling about a deficit area.
I am putting the full set of 32 cards on TPT. You can reach it by clicking on the button at the top of the page.
I am listing the first 11 cards here Good Thing no. eleven cards. I would love to get your feed- back on how they work for your students.
This is an activity I use with my social pragmatic groups. The activity requires students to use a trial and error method of problem solving. It is a good one to use for defeating Rock Brain because to be successful students need to be willing to try different moves. For students who fall apart when they are wrong, it provides opportunity to defeat Glass Man. This activity can be used to reinforces the idea that mistakes are not necessarily bad and can be used for learning. It is important to talk about this before you begin so students have the tools to work through their feelings in a constructive manner.
This activity also teaches students to work together toward a common goal. The solution will be found by observing the mistakes of everyone and it would be very difficult to succeed individually. Students also need to use their short term memory and make inferences to predict the pattern.
This activity can be used with small groups of students, two competing teams, or with one or two students. The object of the game is to cross a 6×6 grid of steps using the correct pattern. I lay the grid out on the floor so that students have a good view and can use motor movement.
Pattern cards are made A judge, who could be a student or teacher, is selected. The judge takes one of the pattern cards that will be the solution to the stepping pattern. A student begins the challenge by stepping on one of the stars in the first row and moves one row ahead for each step. As the move is made the judge indicates if it is the correct one by saying right or wrong move. A buzzer for a wrong move adds a game show feature and are available free as an app. If it is the right step the student continues to move forward. If it is the wrong step the person returns to the start or the end of the line and watches the attempts of others until they get to the front of the line again. The students may notice that a pattern is developing as students discover the correct moves. This will speed up the progress until someone finally makes it across. Everyone that was paying attention can then make the crossing. Students should be reinforced for working as a team and not as an individual competition to make it to the finish.
It doesn’t take much to make pattern cards and a grid on your own. However, if you prefer to have some of the work done for you, I am putting a set up on the TPT store for download at a minimum cost.
It seems a lot of people were enthused about the rubber band and paper cup activity. If you liked that one, you may also like the paper tower activity. It has been in the social pragmatics section. Sometimes when directions are just on paper you don’t see how great an activity is. I think the paper tower might be one of those activities. You usually don’t have to go far for materials. Just empty out your recycle box.
This activity works well with Rockbrain if you are doing the Superflex program. A little instruction about being flexible with your thinking and allowing other people to have different ideas helps on this one. I have used this activity with different sizes of social pragmatic groups who were sometimes divided into competing teams. They were given flat pieces of paper out of the recycle bin and told to build as high of a tower as they could. No other materials were allowed. There really isn’t a wrong way to do this. It seems they typically divide into the cylinder group, or the fold into squares or triangle group.
It really is a good activity for group participation and sharing of ideas. They have made it as high as 6 levels. By that time a student is standing on a chair and no one is breathing. One false move and the whole thing comes tumbling. Hopefully no one will have a Brain Eater moment.
Just a note to let you know I updated the (Comprehension of Complex Sentences) I am putting 3 pages for a free download here.
I have 36 cards available at the TPT store
Having a party day mid week sure throws off the concentration. There was a level of energy that was hard to contain. It made for a long week with a lot of interruptions.
This month the 4th grade students studied different types of machines. The final task was making machines that would deliver valentines to their valentine boxes. The styrofoam cup activity that is in the pragmatics section is a good example of a tool/machine operation. I decided to bring it out again to reinforce what was happening in the classroom and add my language component. I used it previous years with larger social pragmatic groups so some of you may already have found it and used it. I thought it was worth mentioning again. I would love to hear how it worked for you if you tried it. Please go to the pragmatic section to download more specific directions.
This time I adapted the activity for my smaller therapy groups of 2 to 3 students. We used 6 to 8 strings on a rubber band and each student pulled 2 of them. I added myself to the mix. Basically the tool is a rubber band with 2 feet lengths of yarn tied to it. Students take a yarn in each hand and pull to open it enough to fit around the end of a styrofoam cup placed bottoms up on a table. They were instructed not to use their hands when moving the cups. When they released the tension the rubber band grabbed the cup and they then lifted the cup with the yarn pieces and moved it into position to form a pyramid. 15 cups make a nice size pyramid. Students took turns being the leader to give directions.
I found adding myself allowed for some sabotage. I just didn’t move unless specific directions were given. One person not moving can make a big difference in the operation of the rubber band which is the beauty of this activity. They learned quickly to use positional words and to work cooperatively. I pointed out that “Whole Body Listening” is important here. One person can ruin the whole operation if they are not focused on the group and cups. That rubber band can assume a rather flat appearance and not be functional if someone isn’t pulling right. Also they can’t make assumptions that people will know where to move.
Today we continued to work with the social pragmatic group using the Superflex program. The lesson of the day required the use of a flexible brain to illustrate how the brain needs to be flexible to grow and handle changes in its environment. There is a comparison of a rigid brain with a flexible brain. For those who do not know the program, Superflex conquers Rock Brain who is not flexible and doesn’t adapt to change well. He keeps getting stuck doing the same old thing.
The lesson manual suggested using a brain mold to make a jello brain. I was in luck because I knew someone who I could get the mold from. The manual did not give actual directions or a recipe. I put this lesson off for as long as I could because I do not have a good history with jello molds. I have a history of jello that sticks to the mold and never turns out looking right. The thought of trying to work with one in the time line of classes had me worried. I figured the jello would melt and be over the table before the session was up.
I researched jello brain recipes on the internet. It turns out that there are a lot of these. Some of them are a bit on the gross side of things. I decided to stay away from the worm and bug infested brains although I’m sure they would be attention grabbing. I wanted something that would be close to flesh tone and stay fairly solid. So I settled for the following recipe.
You need 3 boxes of jello with orange to pink colors (watermelon, peach), Evaporate milk (12 0z), green food coloring, and 2 1/2 cups boiling water
Dissolve the gelatin in the boiling water, Spray the inside of the mold with vegetable o spray. Add milk and cold water to the gelatin mixture and stir until smooth. Add 2 drops green food coloring. The mixture should look more flesh-colored. Add a drop at a time until you get the right color. Pour the mixture into the mold and put in the refrigerator. This brain turned out to be quite solid and kept its form several hours.
For the lesson, slips of paper with brain functions from the categories of social awareness, motor,and factual/science are inserted into the jello brain. The students take turns pulling these out and talking about them. I debated the best method of getting the papers in the jello. I ended up laminating the papers and poking them in after the brain was taken out of the mold. This way ends of the paper were left sticking out and easy to grab with tweezers. Surprisingly, the brain is still in good shape after the papers are removed and I can use it again for another group. No one asked if they could eat it. I took a picture of the brain so you could have a visual.