social skills
Autism Awareness – Language Processing and Social Skills
Autism awareness requires an understanding of the importance of addressing language processing and social skills deficits.
As we enter Autism Awareness Month, we want to help parents understand the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach to working therapeutically with children on the spectrum.
Children on the spectrum are at risk for language and social challenges, often due to their individual processing challenges. Finding a team of professionals, (Occupational Therapist, Speech Therapist) who can identify the root of a child’s struggles is the first step to creating a plan on how to build a base for development in these areas.
By taking into consideration the “whole child”, Occupational Therapists and Speech Therapists, working collaboratively under one roof, are able to help parents prioritize next steps to maximizing their child’s development and potential. The skilled clinicians will evaluate a child, determining his/her interests, personality, goals, motivation and strengths, as well as areas that can be improved. Using this information, they can plan an engaging program of intervention to target and remediate the child’s difficulties, and strengthen language processing and social skills concepts such as collaborative play, cooperation and negotiation.
The compassionate therapists will work hard to form a solid, trusting and fun relationship with each child. They will pivot and evolve therapeutic strategies and implementations, to help a child generalize skills across the disciplines.
Social Pragmatic Language and Autism
Pragmatic language is the use of appropriate communication in social situations. Language deficits in children with autism will contribute to their difficulties with social interaction with peers, as they do not intuitively understand and use social communication concepts, and must be guided in the learning of these skills.
Because language is the vehicle that drives social interaction , difficulties with literal language comprehension and use will hinder success in turn taking, perspective taking, and reading social cues. Additionally, when a child cannot easily access language “on demand” during peer interactions, anxiety can form, and this can affect their self-confidence.
Bringing a child into a sensory gym allows the speech and occupational therapists to also observe and analyze a child’s behaviors as they engage in play, both solitary and peer-to-peer. The therapists use this environment to encourage use of language to facilitate successful play and engagement, resulting in a positive and confidence-building outcome for the child.
This interaction between language and social engagement, will also exercise and strengthen executive functioning, appropriate behavior, conversation and narrative language, reasoning, social problem solving (organization of thought), perspective taking, whole body listening, and humor.
During Autism Awareness Month, if your child is struggling on the spectrum, consider reaching out and learn more about learning opportunities facilitated by informed, knowledgeable and compassionate mentors, including teachers and therapists. Together, we can bridge the gap for your child and help him/her build the “scaffold” needed to move to higher learning and more successful social engagements.
Social Learning Prepares Children for First and Second Grade
Your kindergartner or first grader works hard at school. Not only are there academic expectations, but your child needs to self-regulate in order to manage the various social expectations. Whether following planned group activities, transitioning from one activity to another, using spoken language to share ideas, taking turns, listening when others speak, or managing big feelings and big energy, social brain building is imperative for success.
Your child wants to belong, feel connected, solve problems, share ideas and work within a group, but it doesn’t always happen naturally. Often a child needs the “just-right” support for their individual make up, to be able to build the foundational skills of self-regulation and flexible thinking, then be able to put them into practice within a group environment.
Children who struggle with self-regulation and flexible thinking in kindergarten or first grade often enter the next grade level with anxiety or struggles with:
- Making transitions
- Managing big feelings and energy levels
- Talking out of turn or grabbing
- Negotiating and compromising
- “Plugging in” to group plans and processes
Could your child use a boost in their Social Brain Building this summer?
Child Success Center’s social learning specialist, Patty Ramsey, LMFT, has designed a 2-week summer enrichment camp that will help campers gain the social skills and confidence they need for successful relationships in first or second grade.
With a plan designed and implemented by CSC’s skilled and compassionate occupational therapists and speech and language pathologists, this summertime fun adventure will allow children to make use of their boundless imaginations and the power of play. As a team, they’ll “create” their “campsite” and problem solve camp themed scenarios, like what they would need to pack for a camping adventure, how they’d get there, what they would do once they got there, what they would take to eat and what they would see.
Campers will use their imagination to guide them on their journey –
destination unknown – of fun, adventure and team building!
Are there resources available for parent support of social brain building at home?
Social Brain Building Summer Camp will provide visuals, activities, and education on key ways for parents to help support a child’s ongoing social learning. Additionally, one parent education session, presented by Patty Ramsey, will be available for more in-depth supports.
Learn more about Social Brain Building Summer Camp
Year round Social Brain Building and Friendship Club at CSC
post updated January 28, 2020
Friendship Club – Practice Social Skills in a Group Setting
Friendship Club groups at Child Success Center are developmentally based and designed to give children an opportunity to practice social interactions with therapeutic intervention and coaching.
For some children, friendships are difficult to make- and even harder to maintain. Friendship Club groups are developmentally based and designed to give children an opportunity to practice successful social interactions with therapeutic staff intervention and coaching. Friendship Club uses positive reinforcement to help children stay motivated to join a group plan, be flexible with their ideas, and stick with social situations that are challenging. Once a child has practice with positive social interactions, their confidence builds. Children are able to join groups easier, transition to and from activities, share their feelings effectively, and problem solve with their friends in order to create meaningful and long lasting friendships. We use the Social Thinking® (Attributed to Michelle Garcia Winner as creator of the Social Thinking Methodology) curriculum to support social skills concepts, role play, engage in group games, and use art projects to facilitate social interaction. We use unstructured play in order to create scenarios similar to those children encounter at school, parties, and play dates in order to socially coach children through big feelings and conflicts.
The goal of Friendship Club is for children to increase their confidence and positive behavior skills to generalize to the home and school setting. Rome was not built in a day, and the same goes for children’s social skills. In this social skills based program, children benefit from being given the opportunity to practice effective communication in a supportive environment. Educating the adults in the child’s life, and using the same social vocabulary in group, at home, and at school helps generalize the desired behavior changes and social interactions. Friendship Club members are physically active and challenged in a sensory gym environment, while being given a social skills curriculum that addresses both social needs and behaviors that may impede successful peer relationships.
It is the job of childhood to learn how to play and interact successfully. Friendship Club uses external motivation, a token economy system, to grow and learn positive social skills. Members “earn” Friendship Tokens they can use to “shop” in our prize bin at the end of each session. Over time, the need for external motivation decreases as the new habits increase and social reciprocity is achieved.
Summer is an excellent time to help foster the social growth of your child, especially for those moving from a pre-school to Kindergarten, or from Kindergarten to First Grade. The Child Success Center offers Friendship Club on weekends through the summer to help children and families stay on track with their social learning.
Learn more about Summer Learning Academy and Friendship Club on our website.
This program, including its teacher or leader, is not affiliated with, nor has it been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by Michelle Garcia Winner and Think Social Publishing, Inc.
How Can My Child Learn Social Skills?
Social brain building to become a “we thinker”, a successful group participant and a friend, is one of the hardest jobs of childhood.
Weather your child is 4, 10 or 15, being a competent social learner does not always happen intuitively. Learning social skills will require that your child is able to attend to a lot of data and decide what are the most important pieces of information, and use emotion, language and motor skills to respond in an appropriate manner within a relationship. A child can acquire those tools when he/she is given the opportunity to experience interactions with others that result in positive and negative outcomes, and is supported throughout the learning process. These learning opportunities can be facilitated by informed, knowledgeable and compassionate mentors, including parents, teachers and therapists. They can bridge the gap for the child and help him build the “scaffold” needed to move to higher learning.
It is often confusing when we see a child, of any age, struggling. We often think first about the psychology behind the child’s temperament and behavior – does it stem from environment, living situation, relationships? In reality, learning to be a social being and be socially competent is really based on a highly complicated neurological process – a process that is automatic for most and creates stress and struggle for some.
Social learning relies heavily on foundations in development that have been put in place to regulate how the brain perceives and processes incoming sensory information, and how it then organizes and delivers an output that is expected and connected, resulting in a positive social outcome. The Social Thinking® (Attributed to Michelle Garcia Winner as creator of the Social Thinking Methodology)Social Competency Model, shown here, uses an iceberg as an analogy. The visible part of an iceberg and what we see above the water, represents the things we can see people do, such as their social skills and behaviors. Yet the entire iceberg is much bigger than that, having a large foundation that goes far and wide into the depth of the sea, correlating to the knowledge, experience and development we hold – the collective information we draw upon and use to interpret and respond to social information that we experience.
As parents, we unknowingly assume our child inherently owns the skills to be a social thinker and adapt collaboratively in any environment. We think that our child’s social learning will just happen on its own.
The fact is that up to 20% of children will struggle with the jobs of childhood due to underlying processing challenges stemming from brain development. They may or may not have functional development and or learning challenges that lead to a diagnosis of speech and language disorder, sensory integration dysfunction, ADD, autism etc. These children are at risk for social challenges often due to their individual processing challenges. Finding a team of professionals, (Occupational Therapist, Speech Therapist, child psychologist) who can identify why your child struggles is the first step to creating a plan on how to build their base of social development.
Red flags that your child might be struggling to build friendships and to develop social skills:
- Prefers to play alone and does not play interactively with other children
- Difficultly understanding how to gain attention appropriately
- Difficulty initiating interactions
- Difficulty staying on topic during conversations
- Difficulty making relevant comments during conversations
- Difficulty following game rules
What types of therapy help a child develop social skills?
During a child’s time as a pre-schooler, an Occupational Therapist can determine if sensory and/or sensory motor processing challenges exist. The OT can also determine if a child is having difficulty with self-regulation, joint attention and intention for a shared play experience. A Speech Therapist can work with a child with language processing issues, and a “peer to peer” or “social brain building” group can be facilitated by both OT’s and ST’s to teach concepts such as collaborative play, cooperation and negotiation.
In elementary school, a Speech Therapist can determine a child’s level of receptive and expressive language, auditory processing abilities, and his use of social-pragmatic language. If language processing and sensory/sensory motor integration issues have been ruled out, small groups facilitated by a psychologist, are helpful in honing a child’s emotional and attention regulation skills.
At Child Success Center, once a therapist has made an assessment and determined the root of a child’s social struggles, then a recommendation is made for the “right fit” therapy.
Options include:
- Individual Occupational Therapy and/or Speech Therapy: One child working with one therapist as part of OT session or collaborative session with ST, with opportunity for peer to peer play experiences in our sensory motor gym to build foundational social skills.
- Paired Peer Speech and Language Sessions: 2 children who have been matched for optimal outcome success, working with a Speech and Language Pathologist.
- Friendship Club: Small group of 4-6 children matched for group skill building needs utilizing social thinking and supporting inside out social emotional development- Led by psychologist.
Ultimately, we want our children to be able to relate to other people’s feelings and to experience a sense of belonging in their classrooms, homes and community. With a solid foundation of social skills, any child can be the key to his own success.
Learn more about Social Learning Programs, peer-to-peer play, and Friendship Club at Child Success Center
This program, including its teacher or leader, is not affiliated with, nor has it been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by Michelle Garcia Winner and Think Social Publishing, Inc.
Social Skills Learned at Friendship Club – Session Starts Saturday, January 23, 2016!
The Child Success Center Friendship Club is designed for the child ages 4-7 who is having a difficult time navigating the social landscape of a classroom or group and/or building friendships.
For these children, growing and learning to engage with others in their universe can be confusing and/or overwhelming, and undesired behavior may emerge or the child may become isolated. Research shows that a common language, similar boundaries, and expectations of a child across all environments aides a child in feeling safe and increasing desired behaviors.
Friendship Club provides opportunities through physical play experiences that help a child fill his or her tool bag with skills. Our large sensory motor gym provides the setting for engaged learning through a variety of fun gross motor activities, including swings, rock wall, zip line, trampoline, pillow pit, monkey bars and more!
Friendship Club uses aspects of floor time and adult-led play to foster comfort for children when engaging with others. It will build upon their current social knowledge and challenge them to grow past parallel play – using their words in sharing, turn-taking, and dramatic play. We also ask for parental involvement in order for the child’s behavior to generalize to their everyday life. We will provide you and your family with tools that will make play dates, parties, and social interaction easier for everyone. An adult will be asked to attend the end of each camp day in order to learn what “tools” we put in the social skills toolbox that day, and how to implement these tools at home. Learn more>
Our next session of Friendship Club begins Saturday, January 23, 2016 – enrollment is now open. Call the Child Success Center at 310.899.9597 for more info or to enroll.
