We had a fun time together during the 3rd period Social Communication lesson today!
Here was our agenda:
We formed a T-chart with the "DO's" on one side, and the "DON'Ts" on the other side, listing the proper expectations and misbehaviors in the appropriate columns.
Here was our agenda:
- Let's review: What are "social skills"?
- Idiom of the Week
- Do's and Don'ts book
- Do's and Don'ts at school
The class reviewed what social skills were, and lots of students had great input to share. We talked about how good social skills meant knowing and using expected behaviors, understanding other people's feelings and thoughts, having conversations, having good manners, being kind and respectful to others, using kind words and gestures, and fixing social problems.
We went over our idiom of the week, which was "to badger someone".
We also read the silly book, "Dogs Don't Brush Their Teeth."
We saw regular dog behavior, like going to dog training classes. We also saw weird behavior that dogs wouldn't do, like sitting at a desk and reading a book in the classroom!
While reading, we worked on various language skills, such as:
- Connecting our background knowledge (some classmates are very familiar with what dogs can and can't do, because they have dogs at home!)
- Finding the pattern in the book in order to make good inferences about what some of these next pages might look like
- Talking about what is happening in the pictures with compound and complex sentences. We really worked on adding more content with preposition words. For example, "Dogs don't...play baseball at the park while wearing helmets and mitts!"
- Answering WH-questions in the book
After sharing a lot of laughs thinking about what dogs do and don't do, our next step was to turn the discussion to what STUDENTS do and don't do at school.
Here were some of the situations we explored:
- When you are in the break room
- When the teacher is giving directions
- When you walking down the hallway to P.E. class
- When you are sitting in the cafeteria at lunch
- When you need to use the restroom during class
The students did a great job working together on this activity, and we now have a pretty good understanding that "do's" are expected behaviors, and "don'ts" are the unexpected behaviors. This will be a re-occurring topic throughout the year as we work on more social rules and skills in different situations and settings!
