Social Communication Skills for Secondary Students

“Social Communication Skills for Secondary Students” uses high interest images to give older students practice recognizing the feelings and emotions of others by considering visual cues such as body language and facial expressions A glossary is provided which presents definitions of specific feeling words and calls upon students to identify those with similar meanings to encourage them to expand their emotional vocabulary. Scenarios are presented which provide students the opportunity to analyze how events within one’s environment can impact a person’s mood. Tasks are structured to provide support for those students who have difficulty taking the perspective of others. A longer list of emotion and feeling words is provided as well as open-ended worksheets, including two pages of picture prompts which provides the teacher resources to adapt these materials to provide ongoing instruction in emotional literacy.

The exercises presented in this workbook can be used to deliver proactive instruction to support the implementation of behavior plans and/or IEP goals in the areas of emotional literacy or perspective taking. These are foundational skills which support behavioral regulation. These activities are ideal for small group instruction or learning centers and an answer key is provided, allowing students to self-correct their work.

Perspective taking and other emotional literacy skills can impact a student’s ability to understand what they read. Unless able to “put themselves in another’s shoes” or perceive the emotional state of others, readers can struggle comprehending many types of written material, from fiction to informational text. Research has found a positive connection between social-emotional skill development and academic performance. This resource provides scaffolds and supports to assist students in acquiring many of the benchmark skills necessary to master a number of the College and Career Readiness (CCR) anchor standards in Reading and their correlated grade-specific Common Core State Standards, including:

• CCR Reading Literature Anchor Standard 1
• CCR Reading Literature Anchor Standard 3
• CCR Reading Informational Text Anchor Standard 1
• CCR Reading Informational Text Anchor Standard 2
• CCR Reading Informational Text Anchor Standard 3
• CCR Reading Informational Text Anchor Standard 4