Budding Actors and Social Skills Goal Setting---Snippets of a Lesson

I'm still learning how to teach social skills.  I went to a couple of Michelle Garcia Winner's talks, read her books, perused her website, but I still feel like a student teacher. 
  A resource teacher and I team-teach four third-graders who have been in our group this school year.  Our last few weeks have been fun, so I thought I'd share.  If you have any ideas to make things better, let me know. As I said, I'm still learning how to do this.

FIRST---the children didn't know what a social skill was or how to define it.  The first day of this unit was spent defining, sorting, and generating more examples.  The photo speaks for itself.  We have subsequently used this vocabulary (academic skills/social skills) frequently when talking about school.
Now they know why they come to our group!

SECOND---I looked in the book to the right authored by Michelle Garcia Winner for ideas, and she suggested having the kids help set their own goals.
Since my students were a little on the young side, they required a great deal of scaffolding for this, so we developed individualized skits in which specific weaknesses were pointed out, and all the kids took turns playing the teacher, themselves, and other students.  A portion of a sample is pictured below, but you can view a complete script HERE.  I made a skit for each child, and it took us two days to get through the acting and goal-setting.  The kids totally got into playing the parts, and then the cool thing was how they were then able to reflect a bit on their own behaviors and formulate some goals.
 

After each skit was performed, the child who was the star would then generate a goal.  We used a teacher (me) as an example first.  The worksheet  to the left was adapted from the book pictured above.  If you would like to download a copy of the worksheets, click HERE.

Obviously, we are not really done filling these out. The worksheets functioned more as a discussion guide and we still have a few lessons and discussion to go.


So this is a little snippet of my day in social skills group!  I'm still learning, but the kids love it, and they make comments outside of the group which indicate that they are learning the social thinking vocabulary, and generalizing some of the skills.





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