Target Social Skills at Home

I am Kelly Thompson, a pediatric speech language pathologist at APT. I love working on social thinking skills with the pediatric population. It is so fun and rewarding seeing my patients build friendships with their peers, using different social thinking skills that we have learned  in speech therapy.

I have gained a lot of my teaching methods from the Social Thinking Curriculum created by Michelle Garcia Winner. One of my absolute FAVORITE Social Thinking activities is adapted from “Add a Thought.” This activity is a great way to target conversation skills at the clinic in speech therapy and at home.

The best way to play an adaptation of “Add a Thought” is by having a set of different colored popsicle sticks or strips of paper. Each player gets a color to place on the table when it is their turn.

The first person in the game begins the conversation by introducing the topic (Example: “I had vanilla ice cream yesterday for dessert.”). They will lay down the first popsicle stick.

The next player will “add a thought” to the initial thought. (Example: “I love vanilla ice cream. I had cookies for dessert yesterday.”) and place their popsicle stick under the first one.

If the thought fits the topic, the player is allowed to add their popsicle stick to the table. If the topic doesn’t fit they can try again and add another thought to keep the flow of conversation going.

This process is repeated until all of the players run out of popsicle sticks.

Conversation skills are sometimes a tricky thing to practice at home, but with this super fun activity, you and your family can have some fun while working on important skills for development in social skills!

– Kelly Thompson, Speech-Language Pathologist