Teaching your Child Social Skills Using Let’s Choose™ Interactive Card Game

Teaching your child Social Skills

Social Skill to be Learned: Wait. POSITIVE CHOICES & CONSEQUENCES (See choice card above on waiting.)

A parent can teach a child how to wait when mom or dad is on the phone, or talking with another adult or sibling, by showing the child the positive consequences that can occur from waiting.

These positive consequences include: earning a fun activity (like playing a game with a parent or going to the park), the child getting what he/she wanted, or feeling proud (I’m a big boy or girl, I can wait).

Parents can also model what a child could say to politely interrupt, or a parent could model the circumstances under which interrupting is appropriate. Also, parents should be cognizant of the length of time the child is able to wait depending on the child’s age.

TIP 1: From a speech-language perspective, Let’s Choose helps parents encourage not only good pragmatic (social) skills, but also, the appropriate sentence structure for asking and answering questions. Let’s Choose also helps children with vocabulary so that children and parents can talk about behaviors (excitement or anger) as they occur.

TIP 2: For each of the skills, I suggest modeling the skills and the consequences that can occur from each of these situations. I also recommend role-playing in which the child can be the parent and the parent be the child. The two can then switch roles.

TIP 3: It is also recommend to keep the card, or a drawing of the behavior, on the refrigerator to focus the child on the skill. Then, the parent can role play different situations with the child throughout the week. Also, the parent could “catch” the child performing the skill and give positive reinforcement.

ABOUT Stacey Buck has worked with children from pre-school to high school. Stacey has a bachelor’s degree from State University of New York at Geneseo in Secondary Education and a Master’s Degree from Northwestern University in Speech and Language Pathology. Stacey also has a special education teaching certificate.

Stacey has worked with children for over 15 years. With her background as a speech- language pathologist, she integrates speech and language treatment into the classroom curriculum for preschool through high school.

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This post originally appeared on our May/June 2011 Magazine