Social Skills
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Set The Scene
Many of the PDF worksheets in the Socials Skills Packet work on social emotional learning. These worksheets help students on the autism spectrum improve their social functioning. Learn more about the above.
Communication Skills Questionnaire
Were you looking for social skills worksheets in the PDF format to determine the concerns or needs of a student with autism? These worksheets were designed precisely for this. Our worksheets work on so many social skills essential for positive interactions, including entering conversations, reading body language, and understanding others' perspectives.
Entering Conversations
When it comes to activities for students with autism, we can help. Please browse our selection of social skills worksheets to get a broad idea of the solutions we have available. Need something special? If you do, then send us an email and let us see what we can do for you.
Elaboration in Conversation
Helpful to individuals on the autism spectrum and to anyone who wants to improve their conversational skills, this printable handout explains the importance of elaborating when answering a question and how elaborated answers keep a conversation flowing.
Polite Wording
This printable worksheet also works on the ability to regard one's listener before speaking, this time by modifying verbal requests and opinions in order to achieve better responses.
Tact
Tact requires putting yourself in someone else's shoes and seeing things from his or her perspective.
Time Sensitivity
This activity works on increasing sensitivity to a conversational partner's time limits, and improves the ability to convey content concisely in order to fit those needs.
Kinesics - Interest vs. Disinterest
This activity is a great resource for teaching kinesics (the ability to accurately interpret non-verbal social cues) and applying that skill to conversations.
Editing Verbal Narratives Worksheets
This printable worksheet also works on the ability to regard one's listener before speaking, this time by modifying verbal requests and opinions in order to achieve better responses.
Speaking to Different Communicative Partners
Adjusting to your communicative partner is an important skill with which individuals on the autism spectrum often struggle. Keeping your listeners in mind (listener presupposition) in terms of what information they need or don't need, and how your words give them a specific impression of you, is essential to successful communication.
Developing Empathy
Theory of mind, the ability to understand the perspectives, beliefs, desires, and intentions of others, is always a challenging aptitude for individuals with Asperger's.
Writing A Complaint Letter
This is one of my favorite activities because it so clearly illuminates for students the importance of keeping your reader in mind, and more specifically, of thinking about how your wording gives your reader a specific impression of you!
Perspective Taking
Developing empathy is not an easy task for many individuals with Asperger's. I believe observation is key. Individuals on the autism spectrum do not naturally observe others' facial expressions, body language, actions, or interactions nearly as often, as attentively, or as effectively as neurotypical individuals do.
Being a Good Conversationalist
Being a Good Conversationalist teaches students the unwritten rules of conversation, including awareness of spatial inclusion, balancing questions and comments, and choosing interesting content. This material can be used as a checklist to assess naturalistic conversation practice, and includes therapeutic notes that educators and therapists can follow for discussion prior to practice.
Choosing Conversation Topics
Many students worry about how to keep a conversation going, and chief among their worries is how to choose good topics. This handout is used to demonstrate how to choose topics that will be interesting, appropriate, and relatable to the conversation participants. It also emphasizes for students the important characteristics of good topics, and shows how informed choices lead to sustained conversations.
Interviewing Others
So many of the characteristics of a good interviewer align with the attributes of a good conversationalist. Interviewing Others is an extensive resource that gives students practice at interviewing other students, family members, and school staff. Students who at first feel nervous about conducting interviews quickly feel more relaxed and competent, as they follow this material's many steps, including choosing questions, setting up the interview, practice, and subsequent evaluation and discussion.
Post-Conversation Questionnaire
Two of the most important components that make someone a good conversationalist are genuine curiosity and accurate perspective taking. This questionnaire emphasizes these two characteristics. Reviewing the content of the questionnaire pre-conversations lets students prepare for what to focus on, including interest in what the other person has to say, reading non-verbal cues, and impressions given and received. Filling out the questionnaire following conversations allows students to assess these aspects of interactions, leading to increased perspective taking skill, and hence better conversation skills.
Tone of Voice
Interpretation and use of tone voice to determine/convey emotions can be difficult skills to teach. Tone of Voice is a user-friendly guessing-game activity that can actually be pretty fun for students. This resource really increases students' awareness of how tone of voice matters in social interactions. There are many ways to modify this activity, including decreasing or increasing the number of emotions from which to choose, and stating sentences live rather than recorded.
Interpreting Non-Verbal Communication Homework
This homework assignment gives students further practice at interpreting non-verbal clues, including eye contact, facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. At the same time, this resource works on perspective taking by getting students to consider how others may feel, what others may think, and how the student may take action to help others out. Giving students this assignment really emphasizes the importance of thinking about others.
Impressions from Appearances
I continue to be surprised by how little my students think about what others think of them. When I talk to them about how people judge others just from appearances, many of my students seem mystified. Impressions from Appearances really gets them to consider this social interaction actuality. This activity not only increases their awareness of how specific aspects of appearance lead to impressions, but also of how impressions can often be inaccurate.
Attaining Targeted Impressions
Once students can understand the connection between appearances/words/actions and impressions, they can start to think about modifying how they appear, what they say, and what they do in order to attain a targeted impression. This activity allows students to consider how they want to come across to specific people in specific contexts, and how their words and actions can convey their desired image.
Impressions and Altruism
This activity is the next step after Attaining Targeted Impressions, because now students are tasked with not only thinking about the impressions their words and actions give others, but also with considering others' feelings. Students learn to recognize others' social emotional needs, such as the need to feel important or to avoid insult, while acknowledging their own needs: what they want and how they want to be perceived.
Understanding Others Reference Sheet
Just as students are provided with reference sheets when taking Geometry or Earth Science exams, I provide my students with a reference sheet that "spells out" common negative and positive experiences during social interactions. This reference sheet helps tremendously with perspective taking! This resource includes three perspective taking exercises, but the reference sheet can be used with a multitude of perspective taking tasks.
Greetings
Greeting others is not as simple as one might think. There are many unwritten greeting rules that individuals on the spectrum may not be aware of. For example, I have a student who says “hello Lisa” every time I see her throughout the school day: each time I pass her in the hallway or enter her classroom to get another student or run into her in the cafeteria. She hadn't picked up on the social norm of speaking a greeting the first time she sees me and nodding or smiling only each subsequent time. This material serves as a reference sheet providing a variety of verbal and non-verbal greetings.
Getting Someone's Attention
Just as with Greetings, this activity works on a skill that is deceptively complex. This resource is an evaluation form that students are tasked with delivering, and the recipient assesses each student's skills at getting attention. The skills outlined on the form (including when to knock, what to say, making eye contact, and determining the optimal spatial distance) can be worked on in various ways leading up to the delivery. I like to roleplay by acting out all the worst possible behaviors for comic relief during my sessions with students.
Restaurant Etiquette
One of our "Real World Communication" resources, Restaurant Etiquette targets every aspect of eating out. Our adolescent students on the verge of adulthood need to know more than just how to give their order to a server. This resource includes skills such as when and how to make a reservation, what to say to a host or hostess, getting your server's attention, paying the check, and how to handle issues like dropped utensils or order mistakes. Perspective taking is emphasized as always, and includes treating restaurant staff with respect.
Answering Job Interview Questions
This "Real World Communication" resource involves perspective taking, specifically how to attain desired impressions. It provides step-by-step directions and plenty of examples on how to best answer the following common job interview queries: "tell me about yourself", "what's your greatest strength?", "what's your biggest weakness?", and "why do you want to work here?" I've found Answering Job Interview Questions to be a user-friendly, comprehensive guide that really helps student improve their interviewing skills.
Passive Aggression
Adolescents need to not only function practically, such as in job interviews or when dining out, but they also need to protect themselves socially from others' detrimental behaviors. This resource focuses on how to handle passive aggressive behaviors from others, which are often subtle in nature yet hurtful. Students learn to consider others' perspectives to determine what is motivating the passive aggressive behaviors or statements, how to stick up for themselves, and how different relationships and contexts impel different responses.
The Social Skills Activities Packet
$ 26
With this packet of 28 products in their repertoire, speech language pathologists, social workers, psychologists, teachers, and life skill coaches will be able to effectively help their students and clients develop the social skills necessary to function well in the social world. These resources include a Communication Skills Questionnaire, followed by several materials that work on conversational skills, including Being a Good Conversationalist, Entering Conversations, and Choosing Conversation Topics. Two materials work on interpretation of non-verbal communication: Tone of Voice and Kinesics. Most of the materials involve perspective taking: some focus on the connection between words/actions and impressions, including Speaking to Different Communicative Partners and Impressions and Altruism, while many of the materials focus on understanding others' feelings, including Developing Empathy and Tact. The packet also provides materials that work on real-life interactions, including Restaurant Etiquette and Answering Job Interview Questions.
Related worksheets to Social Skills
These social skills worksheets and activities for individuals with Autism and Social Pragmatic Communication Disorders target a variety of social skills, including the development of empathy, perspective taking, kinesics, listener/reader presupposition, and conversational skills
$26
