Using books to teach social skills is a great way to introduce and practice social skills with students in special education classes. By talking about social skills in relation to the characters in the book, it helps students to be more open in the discussion because it takes the focus off them. here are 10 books that are great for focusing on social skills in the classroom.
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You are reading: Social skills books for middle school
choose your own social skills books
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The What Should Danny Do series of books is a must! the choose your own format allows students to see what would happen if you made the right decision and the wrong one. it is almost like living a contingency map. the stories and issues are highly relatable to students, making them ideal for improving social skills at home and school. the series has also been expanded to what should darla do? highly recommended!
books for coping skills & emotions
b is for breathing is one of my favorite books on coping skills. there are so many ways to use this book. you can incorporate the alphabet as it lists a different coping strategy for each letter, you can try different strategies and compare which one helped the most, you can graph which strategy is used by more/less people, etc. it’s a great way to talk about how there’s no one strategy that works for everyone.
When I teach about emotions, I like to use these two books.
- The Color Monster: A Story About Emotions: I really like how this book highlights that sometimes you have more than one feeling or emotion. talks about how having so many emotions swirling together can be confusing. As a continuation of this book, we make a bottle of mindfulness.
- my magic bottle of emotions pop! is another great book for working on social skills and emotions. This book talks about the different types of emotions and what they can be like when you feel that way. As a continuation of this book, we make a mindfulness bottle out of lots of different colored glitters.
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To make the mindfulness bottle, we pour colored water into an empty plastic bottle. we add glitter and some clear hair gel. then just tape or hot glue the lid. Using our mindfulness bottles, we talk about how confused or confused we can feel when our emotions are out of control. shake the bottle to create an image of how you feel. then we watch the bottle until all the glitter and swirls have settled. we talk about how much calmer our bottles are and relate it to how our body feels when we are calm. after this lesson, keep the bottles in the classroom to help students calm down when they need them.
julia cookbooks for social skills
julia cook has many different books that focus on social skills. she is great at adding real life situations and visuals to help students really understand the social skill or problem. here are my 4 favorite julia cookbooks:
- my mouth is a volcano is great for talking about how to yell and how to use conversational skills.
- I have ants in my pants can be used for many abilities. we use it to talk about sensory needs, how our actions affect others, and idioms. I highly recommend this book!
- personal space camp is a must have for special education classes! This book talks about body awareness, social skills, and language concepts. This is a great book to follow standing inside hula-hoops to talk to each other to help students realize how close or far they need to be from each other.
- Don’t be afraid to fall is a book that focuses on life and social skills. this book is about liking everything the same and having a hard time dealing with change. the ability to handle change…even good change…can be a big challenge for our students. this is a great book to tackle the concept of change.
Using books to teach and reinforce social skills is a great way to divert a child’s attention while still addressing the skill. Once we have talked about social skills, we focus on putting them into practice and highlighting them. read the blog post, build social skills & class moral, to see how we celebrate when students use social skills appropriately.
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