HELPING STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES DEVELOP SOCIAL SKILLS, ACADEMIC LANGUAGE AND LITERACY THROUGH LITERATURE STORIES, VIGNETTES, AND OTHER ACTIVITIES

Book excerpt: This social skills manual will present to teachers and parents lesson plans complete with literature stories, vignettes, and other activities to help students with disabilities develop social skills in all their environments. The general skills and social skills at work are presented within detailed lesson plans that place emphasis on the vocabulary and the different lesson plan objectives that are essential to each lesson. These generic skills will enhance an individualfs ability to access social contexts in which healthy engagement can occur and improve the ability to cope with challenging tasks that are encountered in daily living. The diversity of instructional techniques used to facilitate content mastery include guided and differentiated instruction, modeling, facilitating analysis and reflection of situations involving the appropriate and inappropriate use of key skills, presentation and discussion of positive and negative consequences of each skill, independent learning, and connecting lessons learned to the central idea of the skills being taught. These strategies are arranged in a logical order wherein the material mastered via one technique builds upon prior ones and provides a context for the next one in the instructional sequence. In most cases, it seems highly likely that students who are led through this sequence could not fail to acquire important information about understanding and applying these skills to their own lives. This important new resource will enable professionals to be more effective in assisting students with disabilities in negotiating the many challenges in making the transition from school to the world of adult living.