Happy Blog Hop Day! This month the world of special ed bloggers joined forces to bring together loads of goodies and tips for you all! With Valentine’s Day seemingly in the distant past, I am ready to turn to St. Patrick’s Day! Holidays are a great excuse for me to work on social skills in a seasonal and fun way. Our kids are generally pretty excited about holiday and seasonal events so it’s the perfect motivation to get them chatting away.
Social Skills Goals
Some of the social skill goals I am focusing on with my higher group are independent conversation abilities. We are focusing on not only initiating a conversation but those ultra important skills of commenting, staying on topic, and asking reciprocal questions. Ideally, we’d like to this all go down without the teacher’s sometimes not-so-subtle prompts.
With my mid-level group, we are scaling it back a bit. We are working on asking and answering questions and basic commenting. This group needs a lot of modeling and prompting. I take advantage of times when my speech pathologist or ABA Interns are in the room so I can model the skills we are targeting. You look a little crazy when you try to model a conversation on your own.
Using Games to Target Social Skills
Games are a perfect way to target all of the social skills mentioned above. Games lend itself to turn taking, are structured, and tend to take the pressure off of ‘just having a conversation.’ I love to incorporate a specified social skill into the games we work on such as making inferences, identifying function, staying on topic, or expanding vocabulary. This way we can really focus on building a certain skill as well as general conversation abilities!
Logical Leprechauns
Logical Leprechauns is a St. Patrick’s Day problem solving game. St. Patrick’s day is right around the corner (crazy, right!?) so I have been getting all my green ready! My students really struggle with problem solving so I wanted to make a game to target this directly. This is a classroom favorite and you can really expand the conversation to accommodate more advanced skills. If you use Super Flex Strategies in your class – this aligns perfectly! We talk all about expected & unexpected behaviors, which Unthinkables are at play, and which social thinking strategies we can use!
This game has 20 cards with different scenarios to respond to!
There are also some trick cards. My kids LOVE these 🙂
Snag this freebie and get it all ready to go for the big green holiday! If you download – I’d love it if you left some feedback!
Keep on Blog-Hoppin’ and check out who is coming next! –
- Planning for the Fall: Part 4 and 5 – Visually Structured Tasks and Routines - January 30, 2026
- Using TAH Curriculum for Homeschooling from a Homeschooling Parent - September 10, 2022
- Using The Autism Helper Curriculum for Homeschool - August 8, 2022
4 Responses
I would love to join your blog hop next time around. I have a separate blog, as well. How can I go about doing that? It looks like there are lots of great resources and ideas to share! Can’t wait to start “clicking”! 🙂
Thanks so much!
Debbie
AutismEducators.com
Of course Debbie! Traci from the Bender Bunch started this one: https://thebendersbunch.blogspot.com/p/special-education-blogs.html. Contact her 🙂
Very helpful thank you
Great to hear! Thanks for reading 🙂