Social Skills Groups

Our social skills groups for children and teens are designed to fuse information based direct and explicit learning along with an opportunity to practice these skills in the community with embedded direct teaching.  This unique concept embraces the current research that states

 

a) repetitive, direct and explicit teaching leads to errorless learning (preview, practice, and review model) and

 

b) embedded direct teaching in the natural environment helps with generalization of skills.

 
At Second Nature Social Skills, we use a co-teach model because it maximizes our instructional success.  Our groups are co-taught by a Speech and Language Pathologist (SLP) and a Social Skills Specialist. We try our best to break our groups into similar interests/challenges and ages. 

 

Our social skills instruction contains, but is not limited to:

  • Theory of Mind/Perspective Taking: Understanding one’s own perspective, as well as other’s motives and intentions.  There are eight components of understanding perspective that must be taken into consideration: feelings, thoughts, personalities, physical needs, prior knowledge, nonverbal body language (body gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions), belief systems (opinions/preferences), and situations. (Baron-Cohen).
  • Executive Functioning: Initiating, self-regulation, sequencing, planning, time management, and organization.
  • Conversation Parts: Components of active listening and joint attention, the structure of a conversation (greetings, small talk, topic maintenance, transitioning to a new topic, fillers, closings), interpreting nonverbal body language of self and others, following social codes (expected versus unexpected public behavior within a certain context), how to initiate a conversation and take turns conversing, and how to use an expected voice (annunciation, tone, rate, volume).
  • Identifying self and advocating:  It is essential for our clients to understand their learning styles and sensory needs so they can advocate for themselves.  Our goal is to assist our clients in living their lives to the fullest of their capacities.