Showing posts with label Teaching social skills to special needs children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teaching social skills to special needs children. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Social Skills Resources for Inclusive Mainstream Schools

Teachers - This could be the best thing you learn about today!

Finding quality and appropriate classroom resources for special needs students that assist with integration is a challenge for many schools.
Do you find you have
“Rarely enough time in a typical school week for the planning and collaboration
needed to make inclusion work well” ?

(Deborah McKnight – Director of Special Education, San Fransisco)

The solution is here at Hometrain!
We have developed a clever range of teaching games, designed to accompany the curriculum, help with problem behaviour and develop the skills of your teachers without spending valuable time away from the classroom.

Introducing ‘Hello’ and ‘How Are You?’
Our interactive computer games are designed for 1-1 teaching and for the whole class to play, talk about and learn.
There are 8 friendly boy and girl characters with fun games that explore different social scenarios. Each game has a video narrator who takes the children through different social scenarios,

Topics include:
Social skills – greetings, asking and answering questions, making friends, exploring emotions, expressing pain, what to do in social scenarios.
Games explore: behaviour in different social scenarios, learning about our bodies, identifying emotions and comprehension of the game or character.

Full printable teaching resources and parent information is included with each programme. Sending these home is a most effective way of demonstrating to parents your level of commitment to providing an inclusive service to their child.

Promoting good practice in your inclusive school:
When children learn how to initiate social communication within natural contexts – such as: home, community and school, they respond appropriately to the communications of others. From here, they can begin to develop positive relationships with others. Therefore, teaching communication and social skills should be a very high priority in an inclusive school.

With Hometrain products, establishing positive inclusion, behaviour and teaching social skills in the classroom is about to get a whole lot easier!

For more info go to: http://www.hometrain.ie/

Did you see our free printables?? - Christmas colouring pages are there too:

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Things you will learn at our new workshop....

Social Skills are the hot topic for Hometrain right now, and preparations for our new workshop on October 12th are going well.

The tag line for this workshop is:

"Using Practical Ideas and Play Methods to Teach Children Social Skills"
- and it will do exactly what it says on the tin (with empahsis on the word Practical).
So what will you learn?
  • About social skills
  • How to write social stories
  • How to write songs for social skills
  • What you need to begin social skills teaching
  • Techniques about working with challenging behaviour
  • Enough new social skills games and activities to last a lifetime!
There's a FREE copy of new game 'Hello' for everyone in the audience, a fab resource pack and lots more.

If you haven't booked your place yet, remember the closing date is October 5th. To print a booking form click here:
http://www.hometrain.ie/download.php?file=Blanch_Workshop_Booking_Form.pdf

It's at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Blanchardstown 7:30-9:30pm - all other details are on our site: http://www.hometrain.ie/workshops/

See you there,

Claire.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Why I should not shout in class...

Why social skills teaching?
We want our children to be able to relate to others and for other's to
respond well towards them.
Right.

When debating this statement with one of my social skills students:
'Why I should not shout in class'
John is 7. I asked the question.
John: Because its too loud
Claire: How will the teacher feel?
John: Sad. No wait... (pause) Angry
Claire: Why is that?
John: Because it's too loud and I'm being too loud

Consider what's invloved in teaching the social skills lesson relating to the statement:
Does he worry about what the teacher thinks of his behaviour? What's his understanding of his peers' perspective? He knows not to shout, and he knows it's too loud, so why does he keep doing it? How can he tell the teacher is both sad and angry? Does he understand and accept there are consequences to his behaviour? Why should/shouldn't he raise his voice to be heard? The list goes on.

In previous sessions, and with John's parents, we established:
1) How John relates to others
2) What difficulties he has interacting
3) At what level is his understanding in relation to his peers

With our list, we then unpick the social skills and rules for each behaviour John has difficulty with, and combining our knowledge of John's:
  • Thought processes
  • Social and emotional skills
  • Flexibility of thought (If I shout in class, then....what will happen?)
  • Imagination skills

The we can devise a social skills teaching plan that is effective. (hopefully)

I am certainly not advocating 'normalisation' of our children - the world is full of people who communicate in different ways for a multitude of reasons. Each one of us has our communication difficulties. I am of the opinion that combining flexibility of thought and social rules with imagination will be a help a child's skills in relating to and responding to others.


(You may have noticed that right now I am preparing for the upcoming social skills workshop in October.)
The challenge of producing ideas to help teach social skills is interesting, fun and mindbending! They are like ancient philosophies - the more you think about them, the harder and more complex they get!

'What's the sound of one hand clapping?' is the social skills equivalent to 'Why I should not shout in class'.

Claire.