Educators will develop a social skill instruction program by:
- creating a program that includes modeling behavior, rehearsal, role-playing, and coaching
- developing a menu of social skills that each child needs to improve
- a list of different teaching modalities (visual, motor, and auditory) with different activities for each social skill
- explanations of how to generalize the strategies learned for different environment
As an actor practices and hones his skills, he becomes increasingly aware of his own feelings and emotions. As he learns to "walk in the shoes of another," he develops a heighted since of empathy for those that he portrays. As educators introduce acting techniques into their lessons, the students will:
- realize how important recreational and leisure activities through the fine arts can be
- lean how to improvise in social situations
- create and deliver speeches and stories
- interview peers
- perform skits and develop their own news segment or cooking show
A dynamic and creative social skill lesson can be made more effectively by adding some fun and technologic effects. By taking advantage of movie-making technologies, students can pretend to trave to anyplace their imaginations want to take them. They can act within the setting of a school, a castle, a forest, or even a video game. Educators can use technology to develop individual social skill video clips of appropriate behaviors, as well as to create stories from the students' point of view.
