We have had a busy few months since my last post! We have been working hard on several concepts. As a follow-up activity to our work with "big problem" vs. "little problem," students have been playing "Double Dice!" In this engaging game they roll a dice and are read a social situation for the matching shape on the dice. They have to read the social situation, decide whether there is a big problem, medium problem, little problem, or just a glitch. Then, they have to discuss what they would do to solve the problem in an expected way. The students love playing "Double Dice" and helping each other talk about the problems we face everyday and how we can solve them calmly while keeping our bodies in the "green" zone.
Also, we have read Julia Cook's book entitled I Can't Believe You Said That!" Julia Cook is one of my favorite author's and writes books for all sorts of social cognitive behaviors we see in school that we need to work on. In this story RJ, the main character, is learning about his "social filter." We each have a social filter, which helps us decide which thoughts we can think in our brains and which thoughts we can also say out loud. Some thoughts need to be filtered and kept in our heads. For example, you would want to filter this thought, "My Mom's spaghetti is gross!" We could think this thought, but perhaps not SAY IT to our Mom so that we wouldn't hurt her feelings. Funny, I had to have this lesson with my own children recently. Superflex also appeared in Mrs. Whalen's room to teach this lesson whole class. Students were asked to pair up and read a statement. Then, they had to decide if it was a "Think It" or a "Say It" and explain why. They did an amazing job! Here is a picture of the anchor chart we used to teach this concept.
Lastly, we have learned about Brain Eater and reviewed how to defeat him. Brain Eater gets us distracted during class and makes us think about our favorite things (e.g. cats, chocolate, video games, etc.). These are called "internal" or "in-the-brain" distractors. We can also get distracted by "external" or "outside-the-brain" distractors. This might be the clock, my pencil, my shoelace. We talked about strategies for defeating Brain Eater and made another anchor chart with those.
Overall, it has been a wonderful few months learning more social cognitive strategies with wonderful students! Onward!
