Social Skills Development

Once each child has the necessary pre-requisites to successfully intergrate into community programs, the program shifts to an increased focus on socialization. This involves supporting the
social development of children with autism in inclusive settings. This consists of environments such as daycares, camps, nursery schools, elementary schools, after-school activities, recreation
activities, and activities of interest.

Best practices indicate that students with ASD learn how to best socialize in naturally occurring environments with typical peers (Miller, 2006). Peer-mediated strategies are shown to be most
effective in the teaching and generalization of social skills (Miller, 2006; Wang & Spillane, 2009; Zhang, 2008, Reichow & Volkmar, 2010).

Some effective strategies to teach the pre-requisite social skills that are often utilized in our in-centre programs are video modelling, self-monitoring and social stories.

Another successful approach to teaching social skills to children with ASD is peer video modelling, which is often utilized to teach pre-requisite social skills in our in-centre programs (Bellini & Akullian, 2007; Bellini, Akullian, & Hopf, 2007; Wang & Spillane, 2009). Video modeling can be used to teach social skills designed for any setting. Once a peer is willing to act out the scene, videos can be used to teach such things as greetings, interactions at specific activities, how to ask questions, how to respond, how to have a conversation and much more.

Teaching self-management skills has also been demonstrated to be an effective technique to help teach and generalize social skills (Lee, Simpson, & Shogren, 2007). This can be done by increasing social awareness of behaviour, self-management, coping, and empowerment (Lee et al., 2007). Children can learn to self-monitor and record their own data when they use social skills at home, in the classroom and in a group setting. For example, a child that learns to do this might take their own data on the number of social interactions during their school day.

Social Stories (Gray, 2000) are another tool that has been identified to demonstrate large positive effect sizes (Wang & Spillane, 2009). These can be used to increase social skills and social
awareness by making individual short stories as visual and auditory information. These are easy to implement and easy to teach facilitators, teachers and parents to understand and follow through with.