Social Thinking Program
The Michelle Garcia Winner Social Thinking program is designed to teach social-emotional concepts and skills to children who struggle with social communication and interaction.
The program’s philosophy is based on the idea that social thinking is a cognitive process that involves interpreting and responding to social cues and context. This approach, views social skills not just a set of behaviours to be learned and memorised, but rather a way of thinking about social situations and making sense of them.
The Social Thinking program uses a variety of teaching strategies, such as stories, visual aids, games, and role-playing, to help individuals develop a range of social-emotional competencies:
The 12 week program covers the following:
- Developing Friendships: Building and maintaining meaningful connections with others.
- Conversation skills: Supporting all the elements of a conversation to facilitate effective communication and interactions with others
- Social awareness: Understanding social cues and nonverbal communication.
- Executive functioning: planning, organizing, problem solving and thinking about one’s own social behaviour and communication
- Social communication: Learning to communicate effectively with others.
- Flexible thinking: Developing the ability to adapt to changing situations and contexts.
- Emotional self-regulation: recognizing and managing one’s own emotions and responses to social situations
- Social problem-solving: Developing strategies for navigating social conflicts and challenges.
- Perspective-taking: understanding others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions based on their context and social cues
These concepts are taught through a variety of interactive activities, including games, role-playing, and group discussions.
Group 1: Age 5-7 years
Group 2: Age 8-11 years
Cost: $150 per week.
Duration: 1 hour (including notes)
