Social Skills Activities For Secondary Students with Special Needs, Third Edition, is a collection of lessons and activities designed to help secondary students with exceptionalities learn to improve their relationships with others.

The material in this book is designed to appeal to special needs students in several ways. The skills are presented in small, sequential steps. The topics are very specific and relevant. The lessons are designed for intentional, rather than incidental, learning. And although the topics covered are serious and important, humor and fun are always included whenever possible.

About the Author

Darlene Mannix has worked as an educator for more than thirty years and has taught a wide range of children, including students with learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, language disorders, reading disorders, and multiple disabilities. Mannix received her bachelor of science degree from Taylor University and her master's degree in learning disabilities from Indiana University. A past presenter at numerous educational conferences, including the Council for Exceptional Children, she is the author of many books, including the third edition of Life Skills Activities for Secondary Students with Special Needs (Jossey-Bass, 2021), Life Skills Activities for Special Children (Jossey-Bass, 2009), Social Skills Activities for Special Children (Jossey-Bass, 2008), and Writing Skills Activities for Special Children (Jossey-Bass, 2004). She has most recently worked as a Title 1 Reading Teacher.

Social Skills Activities for Secondary Students with Special Needs, Third Edition, was designed primarily for teachers working in a classroom setting, although parents, counselors, and anyone else working or living with secondary school–age children or teens in need of social skills training will also find it useful.

Social skills training is somewhat unique in that special needs students often require precise, intentional instruction for situations that are navigated easily and naturally by most students. Many special needs students have a hard time recognizing social cues from their environment, and they do not understand how to respond appropriately to people or events. Making and keeping friends is another area that is particularly challenging for special needs students.

The focus of this book is to present specific social skills for examination, training, and practice. The skills covered are based on the tasks and situations most commonly found in a secondary student's environment.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into three main parts:

• Part One, “Personality Traits: What Are You Like?,” seeks to help students answer questions about their basic personality traits. Using common examples, situations, and questions, students are guided into rating themselves on numerous traits using a spectrum with two views of one behavior at each end. Are they introverted? Are they extroverted? Group enthusiasts? Prefer to work alone? There are no right or wrong answers here; this is simply a way to help the students think about their personality traits. These traits will affect the students' successful navigation into social situations.
• Part Two, “Learning Basic Social Skills,” delves right into specific skills that are helpful and necessary for an individual to acquire in order to be socially successful. This part of the book covers skills that relate to making a good impression (for instance, displaying acceptable behavior, listening, and communicating), skills for self-improvement (viewing situations realistically, controlling emotions, using a sense of humor appropriately, and so on), and skills for being around others (for example, respecting authority, being flexible, and negotiating).

  Each social skill unit contains instructor pages that give a brief rationale for teaching the skill, information on the worksheets within each unit (including suggested or typical answers for each worksheet), open-ended questions for deeper thinking and discussions, and numerous worksheets designed to teach the given social skill. Helpful websites are also listed for many of the skills.

• In Part Three, “Applying Social Skills in Life Situations,” students are given the opportunity to apply the skills they learned in Part Two to a variety of situations at home, school, or work, among peers, within the community, and in leisure activities. Reference is often made to the social skills studied in Part Two to apply to practical examples in various settings.

How to Use These Materials

This book can serve as a general resource, with which you can address specific skills according to the needs of the student. You can also use the skills as the basis of an ongoing curriculum for daily social skills training within a classroom. The skill units can be used in any order.

Some ideas for implementing a social skills unit include the following:

• Introduce a weekly social skill that will be highlighted in your classroom and applied whenever possible to daily activities. Look for opportunities to mention the skill and point out when you see a student using techniques from an activity.
• Present the rationale for why the skill is important and explain that this will be the focus for the week. Make it an important part of class.
• Each chapter offers numerous student worksheets, which lend themselves easily to being used on a daily basis. Don't overwhelm students—or yourself—if one a day is not the right pace. The goal is not to provide correct answers; it is to change behavior. Recognizing the appropriate use of a particular skill is a great first step.
• As you guide students through the “social skills time” or whatever you call your sessions, remind them of the skill they are working on.
• Look for examples of good behavior throughout the week. Ask students to point out acceptable examples they see in each other.
• As you discuss the worksheets, make connections for the students between this skill and how it will help them in their daily life.
• As problems or opportunities arise, ask students what skill would be helpful at that time.

I hope that you and your students will find these materials to be helpful and enjoyable!

—Darlene Mannix

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 an answer to the question, What are you like? Information should include how they see themselves on the major positive personality traits and a few statements about their individual tendencies.

Also included in this chapter is a lesson on verifying student responses. Students may think they are behaving appropriately in a given situation when they are not. A student may decide they are not a leader, but someone else may recognize leadership qualities that just have not yet been developed. Students are asked to verify their responses by obtaining input from other people.

So, as you keep in mind that this is not a scientific assessment, please use the worksheets to have students explore personality traits; discuss what they are personally like, laugh at the examples, and refrain from labeling one end of the line as “good” and the other as “bad.”

We are all social beings, and maybe the first person to make peace with, learn about, and care for is yourself! With that as background, the social process can continue to involve interaction with others!