Last week our district was fortunate enough to have a speaker from Social Thinking come to do a presentation for our staff. The title of our training was "Implementing Social Thinking Concepts and Vocabulary". I was already familiar with many of the ideas discussed since I own several of Michelle Garcia Winner's publications, but it was nice to hear someone talk about the concepts rather than reading about them. The one thing that I took away from the presentation was an idea that I thought was so clever that I wanted to share it on this blog. The presenter spent some time talking about Story-Grammar-Marker and its value when teaching story comprehension. She then suggested that SGM can also be used for social problem solving to review good choices versus bad choices. I typed up an example in my homemade adapted SGM template (sadly I don't own the program, only the braid and some posters) to demonstrate this idea: Click to enlarge. I just thought it was a really novel spin on social stories! And if you are already using SGM with students to target story comprehension this might be an easily adaptable way to talk about social skills with them as well. ~Viola
