3 Things to Think About for Getting to Know Your Social Group

          

        Getting to know your group is an important part of a successful social group. You want to know as much as you can about the kids in your group before they arrive so you know whether or not the activities you’ve chosen for the day are appropriate and how best to structure your day. Here are some tips on getting to know your group so you can have the best social group ever!

       1. How many kids are coming?

--       Is your social skills group going to have 4 kids in it or 14? Knowing how many kids are coming to your group is important not only for knowing how many adults will need to be present, but also for planning your activities. CandyLand is a lot harder to play with a big group than a small one, and team activities are pretty much impossible with teams of one or two. When you’re scheduling your social group, double check how many kids are signed up for a given day and plan accordingly.

This space is better for a big group, while the room below would be better for two or three kids

2.      2. What are your kids’ skill levels and interests?

--       Think about each of your kids’ skill levels, and individualize the activities and goals. If some of your kids are nonverbal, playing something like HeadBandz or other similar games is going to pose a serious challenge. Similarly, if some of the kids in your group have higher skill levels and would benefit more from activities like cooking lessons or science projects, having the entire group play Hi Ho Cherryo because some of the other kids need counting practice is going to be a waste of time that could be used building other skills. If your group has vastly different needs, levels, and interests, think about breaking up into smaller groups for some activities to better foster the social skill development that your kids need. In a similar vein, it’s not appropriate to pair up, for instance, a nonverbal 15 year old and a nonverbal 5 year old. Though they may have similar verbal goals on a basic level, their interests and other goals are probably going to be very different. For more information on individualizing goals, check out our post here.

This project is fun for kids working on their fine motor skills, but might not be appropriate for kids who have already mastered those skills.

3.      3. What are your kids’ behaviors?

--       Are some of your kids more prone to tantrums or running away (eloping)? Are some of your kids likely to join in the screaming if another kid has a tantrum? Know what kind of behavior is more likely to happen with each kid. If you know one of them is likely to elope, maybe don’t play a lot of games near the door or play outside. If a kid is known to pull hair, keep an eye on them if they’re playing with kids or adults with long hair. Knowing your kids’ behaviors and their antecedents (what comes before the behavior) is an important part of having a functional and successful social group. If you notice a behavior that happens with some frequency during social group, keep an eye out and see what happens before that behavior. For instance, if one kid frequently has tantrums, look out for what changed in their environment immediately before the behavior occurred. Once you know the antecedent, you can decrease the probability that the behavior will occur by making adjustments to the social group environment. A great way to figure out antecedents is to do a functional analysis. These analyses should only be conducted by a certified behavior analyst who has extensive experience, but once completed, should yield an accurate and reliable explanation of behavioral patterns. 

Product Spotlight (part 2)- Green Box Kids Book 2: Compromise

Welcome to part 2 of our spotlight on Green Box Kids Book 2: Compromise! We’re going to go over how to most effectively use the book with your learners, and why you should go over to Teachers Pay Teachers and download it.

      Compromise is one of the most important skills for kids to learn; it's also one of the most difficult to teach. It can be tough for kids to put themselves in other people's shoes, especially when compromise means not getting to do a preferred activity. Kids can struggle to understand why compromise is important. Take the following example question from the book:

This is a pretty common situation, and it can be difficult to explain to your kids that neither one of them is more entitled to the red token than the other. No matter who gets to use the token, one or more kids is not getting something they wanted without fully understanding why. We know how frustrating it can be as an educator or instructor to know exactly what skill you need to get across to your learner, but not how to help them understand it.

We found solutions to these dilemmas through years of teaching social skills like compromise to kids with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental and behavioral disorders. The questions and activities in this book are the result of extensive experience and research. The material is easy to read, with large fonts and contrasting font and background colors. It’s also easy to follow, with plain, conversational language. This book is meant to make teaching compromise easier and broaden your learner's understanding of why compromise is crucial, all while teaching your learners the importance of taking other people's feelings into consideration when making decisions. When using this book, your learners will be engaged throughout and will have to think and work together to complete the activities. Each activity and comic includes examples and scenarios that are applicable to your learners’ lives and promote generalization across environments. By using kids in our comics, we relate the situations the Green Box Kids face to your learners’ real lives. Whether you’re a BCBA, a Registered Behavior Technician, a special education teacher, or a parent, this book is easy to use, and the program and data sheets in the back are a great place to start individualizing goals for your learners.

We’ve all had to try to learn something or complete a task that we couldn’t get into; trying to engage in material when you just don’t find interesting or applicable to your life can feel like an impossible task. Green Box Kids believes that social skills training doesn’t have to feel like a chore. Green Box Kids Books make learning fun and emphasize why learning social skills is important to your learners instead of just what social skills are. We engage kids on the topics that matter to them because we think you shouldn’t have to compromise on fun or learning.     

Product Spotlight (part 1)- Green Box Kids Book 2: Compromise

              Today we’re going to take a look at one of the awesome products we have available for purchase on Teachers Pay Teachers! Compromise is the second installment of the Green Box Kids series of comics-based social skill development activity books for children with an autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, a developmental disorder, and other behavior disorders, developed by behavior analysts for special education teachers and specialists. In part 1 of today’s blog we’ll go over the structure of the book, then in part 2 we’ll go over how to use this book with students!

            Green Box Kids Book 2: Compromise starts with a few pages of introduction to the series and the characters before going over some guidelines for how to best use the activities inside with your student or students before getting into the activities. Every book has 3 different thematically-appropriate comics with matching pre-comic questions and supplemental activities for you to work through with your learner. We’re going to over just one of the comics titled The Pizza right now, but the rest of them are available through downloading the book on Teachers Pay Teachers.

            Before we look at the first comic, there are a few questions to get your learner thinking about compromise. They work great as discussion questions for both groups of learners working through the activities together or one-on-one with an individual learner.

            After the introduction questions, learners read over the comic, which sees Green Box Kids Tito, Lisa, and Richard trying to decide what toppings to put on their pizza. Tito adds lots of spices and onions to the pizza, even though Lisa and Richard tell him that they don’t like pizza with spices or onions. The comic ends with a social dilemma for your learners to work through: why Lisa and Richard are unhappy that Tito put spices and onions on the pizza? The book breaks down the comic piece by piece to help your learner analyze the characters’ facial expressions, body language, and words to understand what the dilemma is.

Once they’ve finished breaking the comic down, there are additional questions to encourage critical thinking and discussion among readers, analyzing each character’s actions and motivations. There are also supplemental activities that readers can do together to practice the compromise skills they’ve been discussing.

Finally, readers are encouraged to draw what they think Tito, Richard, and Lisa should do to resolve their dilemma with compromise before showing what one correct response in the comic could be. The book makes sure to acknowledge that there are lots of different ways the Green Box Kids could have compromised.

The book itself ends with behavior extension material for educators and instructors, including a compromise program that can be individualized for each learner and example data sheets that can be used in one-on-one or group settings.

We’ll go more into how and why to use these materials in part two, but if you’d like to see the full book right now, you can download it here at Teachers Pay Teachers!

Why Individualizing Goals During Social Skills Group is Important

Imagine walking into a class on English Literature and finding that the first several classes were going to go over basic words like “cat” and “car,” and your first exam was on short novels like ones you read as a kid. For some people who are just starting to learn and read English, those classes would be valuable and necessary to learning more complex words and building reading comprehension. To a native English speaker, it seems like a waste of time and you’d be bored and frustrated having to spend your time learning about the silent “e” all over again. In this case, your goals and the goals of everyone else in the class, regardless of skill, have been mashed together and you need to catch the less-skilled classmates up before you can learn anything new.   

Lucy may excel at gross motor function, but maybe one of her goals should be listening to directions.

This is why individualized goals at social skills groups are important. Some of the kids might really need to work on basic intraverbal interactions (“What’s your name?” “Barry, what’s yours?” “Richard.”), but some of your kids may already have mastered those intraverbals and don’t need to practice asking peers what their name is or what their favorite color is. Get to know each kid in the group and understand what each one needs to work on, and what’s appropriate for them to work on. Knowing what each kid needs to work on means it’s easier to pair them up with each other for practice; if Barry and Richard both have goals for initiation, they can both be presented with natural opportunities to initiate with each other. Or, if Barry is great at reading comprehension games but needs to work on initiation, maybe he could get paired up with Lisa, who's great with initiation but needs help working on reading comprehension. Knowing individual goals makes it easier to help kids help each other in age appropriate ways. If a kid has an Individualized Education Plan for social and behavioral goals at school, they should have something similar at group.

Barry could use a friend who's a good with sportsmanship to help him develop that skill.

Just a few of the folders we use to organize individualized goals and data sheets for our social groups.

            There’s a saying in special education: “If you’ve met a kid with autism, you’ve met one kid with autism.” No two kids are going to be the same, have the same goals, like the same things, and it’s unfair to treat them like they all popped out of the same mold. It’s important to remember to treat kids with autism with the same respect and nurturing as you would treat any typical kid. Individualized goals keep those kids from fading into the hectic background of social skills group and keep them improving and growing into the awesome adults they’re going to become. Individualized goals reduce frustration during groups and keep minds active and learning, which is the most important part of any group. It is a disservice to give the kids anything less than individualized goals and the attention and guidance they need to reach those goals. Think about the earlier example of the English Lit class; you wouldn’t want to have to sit through Cat in the Hat again when you know you could be doing more advanced work. You also wouldn’t want to launch headfirst into Dickens before you can work out the rhyme schemes in Hop on Pop. Remember to have the same consideration for the kids in your social group and put yourself in their awesome light-up shoes.

4 Tips on Setting Up Your Space for Social Group

1. Prepare before your kids arrive!

-- Nothing is worse than trying to get activities set up while kids are running around, so it’s a great idea to get all of your activities and materials ready before they get there. You don’t want to be running to the printer to get worksheets and get flooded with requests for dinosaur coloring sheets. This goes for scheduling too; a good schedule is important for a really good play group. Autism spectrum kids often have difficulty transitioning from highly-preferred activity to a less-preferred activity, like free play to social skill lessons, so arrange your schedule in a way that will make that an easier transition. A good way to do that is have some sort of neutral activity prepared for when the group arrives, something between highly-preferred and non-preferred that can work as a transition activity.

At the end of a group session we make sure to line up our clipboards in one place so we don't have to worry about tracking them down the next morning.

2. Make your space safe.

-- A lot of this is just common sense stuff that may get overlooked in the rush of setting up activities and getting data sheets ready and getting in that first (of many) cup of coffee. Make sure all of the electric plugs are covered and that those plugs aren’t easy to pull out. All sharp things like scissors should be put out of reach from little (or not so little, there are some pretty tall 10 year olds) hands, and be sure to supervise closely whenever they’re in use. If your play space has columns or sharp corners, it’s a good idea to cover them. In our group play space, we have large square columns in the middle of the room, which we’ve covered with thick, fuzzy carpet from target. They look cool, and they make the room that much safer. Additionally, be aware of any allergies or intolerances your kids may have; you wouldn’t want a kid with a peanut allergy sitting next to someone who’s preferred food is peanut butter.

Covering the pillars with carpet makes them both way more fun than
normal pillars and much safer.

3. Know your group.

-- Part of making your space safe is knowing your kids’ behaviors. Will there be kids there who elope (physically run away from activities)? Then it’s a good idea to have an adult near the door to catch and redirect kids who make a break for it. Balloon popping activities aren’t great for kids who are averse to loud, sudden noises. If there are kids there who don’t read or have an easier time looking at pictures, consider a visual schedule and labelling things like the toilet, sink, and individual rooms like craft room, kitchen, and classroom with written and pictorial labels. If some of your kids are likely to have tantrums or have destructive behaviors, consider a cool-down room or hallway where they can go and calm down before rejoining the group to avoid a snowballing of tantrums across the group.

Barry could definitely use a cool down room. 

4. Have fun!

-- Social group should be fun for the adults and the kids. Yes, it’s going to be work for the adults as you take data, watch the kids, and foster social skill development, but it’s also work for the kids as they interact, learn, and grow. For a lot of Autism Spectrum kids, interaction takes conscious work and effort. Make sure that they’re having fun while they’re learning. It’s kind of like Mary Poppins; a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, so if the group wants to listen to Let It Go even though you’re 80% you’ll explode if you hear it one more time, go ahead and let them listen to it. If the group wants to listen to Let It Go for the 11^th time in a row, maybe it’s time to switch to that neutral activity before you actually do explode. In every job that must be done, there’s an element of fun, and that fun is going to help those social skills the kids are developing stick.