Social Skills
What are Social Skills?
Social skills are the verbal and nonverbal behaviours that allow people to participate in various social situations.
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience challenges in social relationships. A deficit in social interactions and communication is one of the identifying characteristics of ASD. Children with ASD may appear uninterested in social interactions and may have difficulty understanding the behaviour of others. Children with ASD may desire social engagements but lack the necessary social skills to develop these relationships.
Adapted from website Connectability.ca
Why Teach Social Skills to Children with ASD?
We understand that children with ASD learn new skills differently. In the same way, social skills must be explicitly taught. Children with ASD take in information about the world and respond to that information in a different way. This has a profound effect on their ability to interact with people.
Social and communication skills are highly interdependent. Difficulties in both of these areas have separate and joint effects on an individual’s ability to develop and maintain relationships with others. Children with ASD may experience a lot of confusion and frustration as a result of these difficulties. This can lead to secondary problems such as tantrums, or other challenging behaviours. Promoting social and communication skills can be critical in the overall well-being of a child with ASD.
Social Development Milestones:
Neuro-typical developing children show the following social behaviours by approximately the ages indicated in brackets:
- Smiles at familiar adults (1½ months)
- Imitates simple actions (9 months)
- Engages in a simple game with others, such as rolling a ball back and forth (1 year)
- Imitates actions of another child (1½ years)
- Watches other children play and attempts to join briefly (2 years)
- Plays alone, in presence of other children (2 years)
- Plays simple group games (e.g., Ring Around the Rosy) (2 years)
- Begins to take turns (3 years)
- Forms temporary attachment to one playmate (3½ years)
- Takes turns and shares without supervision (4½ years)
- Plays cooperatively with up to two children for at least 15 minutes (5 years)
- Has several friends, but one special friend (5 years)
- Plays cooperatively in large group games (5½ years)
Adapted from A Work in Progress, 1999
Social Skills of Children with ASD:
The social skills of children with ASD may differ from those of typically-developing children.
Below are some characteristics of social skills that children with ASD may demonstrate:
- Often shows attachment to familiar adults, such as a parent, but may be uninterested in other adults and children
- May demonstrate an awareness or interest in others but may not have the social skills to interact appropriately
- May have difficulty imitating peers
- Imagination and pretend play are limited and play is generally repetitive
Identifying Social Skills:
1. Social Skills to Target for Young Children with ASD
- Attending to objects
- Being with other children
- Imitating
- Sharing
- Turn-taking
- Asking for help
- Using social conventions (e.g., “Please”, “Excuse me”)
- Voicing greetings and farewells
2. More Advanced Social Skills to Target for Children with ASD
- Displaying peer entry skills
- Offering help
- Asking someone to play
- Playing a game
- Identifying emotions and other nonverbal cues
Observe the Social Skills of the Student with ASD
It is important to observe both the student with ASD and their peers, in order to ensure that the social skills activities are as follows:
- Consistent with the child’s likes/dislikes
- Lending themselves to interaction with others
- Age appropriate
- Peer appropriate
***Although making activities age and peer appropriate is the goal, the child’s skill level and interests must also be taken into account.
Strategies for Teaching Social Skills to Children with ASD
Joining In
Children with ASD may have challenges initiating and including others in their play. Start with activities such as People Games and People Toys (see above), that do not require toys, but do involve another person, such as physical activities like tag or chase. Structured activities are predictable and become routine. They will eventually leave little to interpret and can be easily taught. Games with repetitive actions, sounds, words, and movements/sensations that the child enjoys encourage social interaction. Singing games like “Ring-Around-the-Rosy” or “Row, row, row your boat” encourage simple social engagement and turn taking.
During “Row, row, row your boat”, pause and allow the student to take a turn by filling in a word and/or the action. Then take your turn and keep the song going. Provide prompts when necessary for the child to take a turn at first. The more practice a child has had with joining activities with another person, the more successful s/he will be when playing with other children.
Tasks that highlight a student’s strengths and interests may be used in peer-directed activities. For example, a child with an interest in weather might take charge of posting the day’s weather on the calendar during circle time.
Play with Peers
Promote play with other children by choosing activities that are predictable, structured, and of interest to everyone involved. Consider games the student with ASD already knows and has played independently. Determine distinct roles to encourage cooperative play, sharing, and turn taking. Adult prompts and modelling may be required to initiate and sustain play interactions among peers. It is important to remember that the goal is to teach the child with ASD how to play with his/her peers.
Here are some toys and combinations that provide opportunities for cooperative play at various levels:
- Ball or car: “sender” and “receiver” (on floor, down a slide)
- Bubbles: “blower” and “popper”
- Toys in the sandbox: “hider” and “seeker”
- Containers, various materials: “filler” and “dumper”
- Talk about a pre-selected topic of interest: “asker” and “teller”
- Cooperative building (Lego, blocks): “builder” and “knocker down”, “block chooser” and “builder”, or take turns placing blocks
- Wagon: “rider” and “puller”
Adapted from: Social Skills for Young Children, IWK Health Centre; and A Work in Progress, 1999
Developing Peer Interaction Skills in Students with ASD
Choose a cooperative peer and ask them whether they would like to play a game with the student with ASD. If the peer agrees, arrange a brief game during which you may provide the children with prompts when necessary to ensure some success for the student with ASD (e.g., popping the bubbles, completing the puzzle, knocking down the tower of blocks). Be sure to build in positives for the peer partner (e.g., praise, access to another preferred activity after the game).
Children with social-communication difficulties may:
- Have difficulty with topic initiation, maintenance and/or closure when speaking with someone
- Talk too much during conversations or talk too much about one topic
- Seldom talk or participate during conversations
- Demonstrate limited or inappropriate use of non-verbal cues to support their spoken message (i.e. eye contact, tone of voice, facial expressions)
- Have difficulty with turn-taking and reading a listener’s verbal/non-verbal cues
- Have difficulty interacting appropriately with his/her peers
- Engage in topics of discussion that are often inappropriate or immature compared to his/her peers
- Does not respond or react appropriately during certain social situations
- Struggle to make and maintain friendships
Social Thinking in the Classroom Setting
All students have to:
- Interpret other students and teachers accurately
- Share space effectively
- Work together in peer-based groups
- Interpret and respond appropriately to the curriculum (higher level thinking skills)
Ideas to Support Social Communication in the Classroom
Why Support a Student’s Social Needs?
Difficulties with social skills can:
- Impact the student’s social relationships and use of appropriate language depending on the situation and people involved
- Impact how others feel and think about the student
- This can impact how the student may feel and think about others and how the student may feel about themselves (i.e. reduced self-esteem)
- Effect the students’ ability “tune-in” to others as they struggle with Theory of Mind
Resources
The Social Consequences of Language Disorders
Theory of Mind (TOM)
Theory of mind involves being able to “tune in” to other people and their perspectives.
Theory of mind involves understanding that people have thoughts and beliefs and that these may be different from one’s own thoughts and beliefs. It allows us to understand that people act according to what they think or believe is true, even if it isn’t. Ultimately, theory of mind involves being able to “tune in” to other people and their perspectives.
This ability begins in infancy when young children learn to pay attention to other people’s emotions and actions. Children learn to copy what people do and eventually pretend to be other people (during imaginary play). These abilities show that they have figured out that others do and say things that are different from what they might do themselves.
Adapted from: Hanen.org article “Helping Children Develop Theory of Mind”
How does Theory of Mind Affect a Child’s Development?
Being able to tune in to other people’s perspectives might not sound like a big deal, but when children have difficulty developing their theory of mind, it makes it difficult to:
- understand why people do and say the things they do
- have a conversation
- tell a story
- take turns
- understand characters’ perspectives in storybooks
- make friends
- play in imaginative ways (pretend play)
Understanding other people’s perspectives is essential for communication. Imagine trying to have a conversation without having a sense of what the other person might be thinking or why that person is behaving in a certain way. It’s easy to provide your listener with far too many (or not enough) details, if you don’t have an idea about his/her experiences, feelings or point of view.
Students with Social-Communication Difficulties may have particular difficulty with Theory of Mind
- Impacting their ability to “tune-in” to others and interpret the situation, impacting their understanding the “hidden curriculum” (or the non-written rules to follow within a variety of social contexts)
- They may not fully understand that everyone has their own individual thoughts, wants, motives and feelings (perspective taking)
- They may have difficulty being good “social observers” to be able to accurately read facial expressions and understand contextual and situational cues to help interpret meaning in social situations
- They may have difficulty interpreting others’ talk and behaviours by considering other people’s thoughts, needs and wants
Helping Students Develop Theory of Mind
There are many simple ways to encourage theory of mind skills. Students with language delay who are at early stages of language development can benefit from:
- Face-to-face, playful interactions – when you follow your student’s lead and engage in activities that spark your child’s interests, they will naturally want to connect with you and pay attention to what you are doing and saying. Children need to pay attention to what others are doing in order to start thinking about others’ perspectives.
Children with language delays but are more verbal, may benefit from:
- Role play – when student’s pretend to be someone else, they need to think about and act out the other person’s perspective and behaviour. Therefore, role play helps them think about other people’s points of view. When your students pretend to be someone else, join in with them and take on a role yourself.
- Sharing storybooks – when you read to your students, try to discuss what the characters might be thinking or feeling. Look for opportunities to use sentences that include the words “thinks that” (e.g. “He thinks that the monkey will run away”). Encourage your students to talk about the story in the same way by asking questions like “Why do you think he is…?” Misunderstandings or problems during the storyline often provide wonderful times to talk about the characters’ different perspectives.
- “Tuning in” words – there are many words we use all the time that describe our perspective, like “want”, “know”, “think” or “forget”. Students need to understand and use these words in order to express their own perspective and tune in to others. A good place to start is with the words “want” and “like” as these develop earliest. Emphasizing peoples’ wants and likes can happen during an everyday activity like snack time, by comparing what your students likes with other peers’ likes (e.g. “You like chocolate cake but Johnny and I like vanilla”). This helps students understand that other people have different wants and likes than they do.
By helping students tune in to others, you will build their ability to think about others’ perspectives. This will help them become better storytellers, playmates and conversational partners.
Resources