Teaching Children Social Skills...

      Children need to learn social skills to be successful.  Our students in our program, really needed to work on these skills. This past summer, during our Extended School Year,  my Special Education team, worked really hard with our students on social skills.  One of the ways we did this was to include a variety of games in the academic portion of ESY.

UNO Card Game

  One of the challenges in Special Education, is the variety of ability levels our students are in the classroom, along with the needs of every student's needs.  We started off teaching the students to play UNO.  The card game that many young people in the US mainland are familiar with.  What I learned right away, is that games like UNO are not well known here in Saipan.  So, I had to work with my aides and other teachers to teach them how to play so they could help the kids.  The staff had a great deal of fun learning how to play the game, and this helped the students later when the staff was helping them.  The students saw our staff having fun and they wanted to have fun too.

  Why UNO?  First off, my higher functioning students needed work on learning social skills, and UNO was a game that allowed us to play with many people and teach them those skills.  UNO also has numbers and colors, that helped some of my students who are having trouble with those skills.  Finally I have a few students who have areas of need that relate to their ability to grasp and hold objects.  UNO being a card game, gave them a lot of practice on these skills.  All the while we were playing, all students where included in the activity with the help of the staff. 

   Now that we are in November we have found that the areas we were targeting for each students seem to have retained.  However we do not have as much time for the games as we did during ESY.  This is why we are currently trying to build time into our scheduled to play other games to reinforce those lessons our students learned over the summer.  One of the ways we are planning on increasing the social skills of our students is to invite them to play games at some of the down time we will have during classroom parties.  We are also going to start having a variety of games our during lunch break so that the kids can interact with their peers who are not on an IEP.  Some of the games we are looking at are, Chess, Checkers, Scrabble, Dominoes, UNO and Boggle.   Each of these games, are games that reinforce critical thinking and social skills. 

   My ultimate goal is for my students to be able to play these games at home with their family and friends.  When I was in college, a friend of mine took me to his home for Thanksgiving.  It seemed if there was a nonstop game of Spades being played.  It was great fun and the entire family took part in the games.  The day before we were to go back school, I taught my friend's family how to play "Liar."  You may know the game as "Bullshit"  but the school safe name is "Liar."  I think many of our students will benefit from this, and I know that many parents want to be able to interact with their children in ways that are fun and educational.