Social+Skills+Picture+Book

Social Skills are imperative to autistic children’s development. Social interaction skills are critical to successful social, emotional, and cognitive development ([|Bellini, p5, 2006]). Therefore, it is important to teach these vital elements to students in the most successful way. Visual aids in teaching autistic children are the most effective. People with autism often have language and attention issues that interfere with their ability to learn from verbal explanations alone ([|Baker, 2001]). Baker’s book ‘The Social Skills Picture Book’ helps autistic students through pictures that model appropriate behavior through acted out real life camera shots. It is this book that I believe helps autistic students to show correct behavior through visual cues and aids.

The Social Skills Picture Book guides uses through the nature of autism, teaching social skills including their strategies, how to use social skills picture books including instructions and how to make your own social skills picture book with instructions on identifying target skills, task analysis, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings and eventually assembling. It then goes through the skills associated including communication, play and emotion related skills. Communication skills involve listening, interrupting, greeting, starting and ending conversations and introducing yourself. As communication is such a varied scale from student to student communicational skills like these are imperative to child learning ([|Matson, p85 2009]). Play skills include asking or joining to play, sharing, compromising, turn taking and dealing with losing. The Social Skills Picture Book deals with play skills in an effective way as it shows children the correct way to interact with others with real pictures. Finally, emotion related skills deals with the inner struggles including strategies to keep calm, showing understanding, accepting “no” for an answer, dealing with mistakes and teasing, and trying something new. It is clear that Children with ASD display emotional responses that seem unusual, inappropriate, excessive, or inadequate compared to the responses of other children in similar situations ([|Capps et al, 1993: cited in Volkmar, p260, 2005]), therefore, these skills are a must in producing the student as a whole.

This book can be included into any classroom that requires the use of special education. Teachers can use the book as a resource and effectively teach autistic children the appropriateness of their actions and more importantly what is the wrong way of communicating and how to fix these using examples to make the action the right way of communicating.

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