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Teaching Social Skills© Juli B
If I could list one significant thing that aspies lack (besides eye contact), it would have to be manners and basic social skills. These skills are not intuitive for those with Asperger Syndrome - they have to be learned. And as parents and educators it is up to us to instill the basics.
For starters, there's a wonderful video guide put out by Dan Coulter, whose asperger son, Drew is thriving in college right now. The video, Manners For The Real World - Basic Social Skills, demonstrates how to act during some of the most common interactions between people. Some of the areas that are covered are: personal hygiene, conversations, introductions, telephone/internet use, table manners, etc. This video is very straightforward and is designed for students from upper elementary school through high school. I watched it alone first, then I watched it with my 5th grader, Andy. Initially he balked at having to sit through a manners video, but it did end up keeping his attention. He even admitted to enjoying many of the scenarios...of course he mostly got a kick out of the demonstrated "wrong" way to act, but that was only because he actually recognized that it wasn't appropriate so I guess that's a good thing. I would definitely recommend this informative video for anyone wishing to break the inappropriate cycles that our aspies are so inclined to get caught up in. In addition to the video, Dan has also published the following article for teaching social skills. I personally found this article to be excellent with examples for us parents to break the cycle in our "backwards" teaching and learn to teach the important social skills "frontwards". TEACHING SOCIAL SKILLS "FRONTWARDS" By Dan Coulter Why do we tend to teach manners backwards? Instead of consistently teaching our kids social skills, many of us wait until they do something wrong and then correct them. Imagine using this approach in a driver's education class. They'd put you in a manual transmission car with no training. Then they'd turn on the engine and shove the car into the street, expecting you to learn to drive from the helpful suggestions yelled at you by other drivers. Anybody think that's an optimal learning situation? To give us parents the benefit of the doubt, we don't use poor teaching tools on purpose. We do what seems obvious at the time. But, looking back, I'm sort of amazed that I kept trying the same thing for so long when it wasn't getting results.
The copyright of the article Teaching Social Skills in Asperger's/Autism is owned by Juli B. Permission to republish Teaching Social Skills in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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