Social Skills Activities for Secondary Students with Special Needs

Darlene Mannix

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119827474
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

A practical and hands-on collection of worksheets to help students learn social skills

In the newly revised Third Edition of Social Skills Activities for Secondary Students with Special Needs, veteran educator Darlene Mannix delivers an invaluable and exciting collection of over150ready-to-use worksheets designed to help adolescents with special needs build social skills, understand themselves, and interact effectively with others.

Organized into three parts, the book covers lessons in self-understanding and personality traits, basic social skills, and social skills application.It alsocontains:

• 30% brand-new materialand thoroughly updated content that includes new lessons and technology updates
• Updated topics, including safe social media navigation, leisure situation social skills, and cyberbullying
• Stand-alone lessons and worksheets thatoffer excellent foundations for individual teachings

Perfect for special educators, general education teachers, and school counselors and psychologists, Social Skills Activities for Secondary Students with Special Needs is alsoan indispensable resource for the parents of special needs children and teachers in training.

Part I
Personality Traits: What Are You Like?

Introductory Comments

Rationale: Every person is unique. Although we are different, as humans we need to be connected to one another on some level, whether it is through a friendship, neighborhood setting, or developing relationships in a group. For some, making connections seems to be effortless—people are drawn to someone with a fun personality, a sympathetic ear, wise counsel, or even just availability. But others, especially those with poor social skills, need a boost or specific training to help them see themselves as others see them, to gain confidence, to learn or improve behaviors, and even to accept themselves as worthy.

This part of the book is divided into two chapters. Chapter 1, “Investigating Personality Traits,” covers many personality traits to consider when evaluating one's own tendencies. Although there are many types of personality tests, the purpose of these lessons is to provide a simple platform where students can identify common personality traits.

The first series of worksheets deals with the “big five,” or common personality traits that most people would agree are desirable: honesty, kindness, trustworthiness, friendliness, and being hardworking. The students are not asked to officially rate themselves on these, but merely to think about these attributes and what it means to possess them.

The second series of worksheets digs a little deeper into common personality traits that are not really categorized into “right” or “wrong” but can be viewed as a spectrum. Is it wrong to be messy? Is it desirable to be fun-loving rather than serious? Is it okay to enjoy the journey rather than focus on the destination? This series of traits is designed for the students to evaluate their own personality traits without judgment! It is to help the students come up with an informal profile of “What I Am Like.” The student is introduced to the idea of a sliding scale with opposite attributes at each end. Again, there is not a moral judgment to be attached to the responses; merely the responses can be used as tools to get the students thinking about where they would place themselves on the spectrum. This information will be useful in later activities.

Chapter 2, “Putting It All Together,” is a third set of worksheets designed to help students take the information they compiled from the previous worksheets and come up with general statements or conclusions about themselves.

For example, suppose you see yourself as a creative, procrastinating, peace-loving introvert. What does that have to do with anything? Well, it does matter in that it affects job situations, choice of friends, being aware of what types of people will build you up or what types of people might take advantage of you. It also helps point out which individual skills would really be beneficial to learn and apply in order to meet personal goals. Knowledge is power—and self-knowledge is something that can be used to help an individual at least identify a starting point.

As students go through the worksheets, it is suggested that they keep data on themselves and compile the information at the end of this section so that they can produce an overview of themselves. They should be able to provide a...