In So Many Words

The New Social Story Book, Revised and Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition
Over 150 Social Stories!

by Carol Gray
Future Horizons, 2010
265 pages

About the Book

Social Stories™ provide REAL social understanding! Carol Gray developed the Social Story™ in 1991 to promote social understanding in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Now, nearly twenty years after their inception, Social Stories have become a standard approach for teachers and parents all over the globe, and the stories are more effective than ever!

This 10th Anniversary Edition of The New Social Story™ Book offers over 150 of the most requested Social Stories, each one professionally written by Carol Gray. But it doesn’t end there—Carol also teaches you how to write Social Stories yourself! Years of experience and trial-and-error have led to updated Story guidelines. Carol explains her fine-tuned process in the included ten-step learning module The Social Story™ 10.1 Tutorials—perfect for parents and teachers!

INSIDE ARE GEMS SUCH AS:

• Mistakes Can Happen on a Good Day
• It Was Fun but Now We’re Done
• When It Is My Turn to Listen
• Saying What I Think with Respect
• Learning to Respond to Bullying
• Telling My Teacher about a Problem
• Fire Drills at School
• Moving to a New Home
• Children Grow Kind Of Slow
• The Truth about Messes
• This Place is Busy
• and DOZENS MORE!

PLUS, to jump-start your story-writing journey, this book comes with a CD containing each Social Story in ready-to-print PDFs AND easy-to-edit Word files! With the CD, you can customize story content and insert images relevant to your child or student’s individual experiences. An invaluable bonus!

My Thoughts

I can’t tell you how fast I jumped at the opportunity to review this book! I have loved Carol Gray and Social Stories for years and am so thankful for teachers and therapists who have helped me write stories for my son on a variety of topics.

With these resource, I can definitely take it to the next level. Not only can I use the stories in the book as they are, I can also modify them for specific situations using the included CD, or I can follow the 10-step tutorial in the beginning of the book to write my own custom social stories.

My son and I have actually read sections of it as part of our bedtime routine and have been able to refer back to them when we encounter a challenging event during the day. Just recently, he has been having more difficulty with handling games, and I was able to print out the relevant stories to be read before games are played both at school and at home. Such an incredible tool to have at hand when it is needed!

Discount Opportunity: If you order The New Social Story Book directly from Future Horizons, you can use the code INTERRUPTED to receive 15% off and free shipping in the continental US.

Note: I received a review copy of this book for free, but all opinions are my own. I am an affiliate of Future Horizons and receive a small amount of compensation for any sales made using the promotional code provided. You can use the code INTERRUPTED when ordering books or other materials – or even conference registrations – to receive 15% off plus free shipping in the continental US.

Taken from the article “Social Anxiety and Social Skill Competencies” by Michelle Garcia Winner, Autism Asperger’s Digest, www.autismdigest.com

Note: This is Part II of the article; click here for Part I, where Michelle outlines the key strategies she teaches for reducing social anxiety. I think the visuals are great – they remind me of what some of my favorite Aspie bloggers refer to as “loops”!

The Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure
Visual representations are strong—and welcomed—tools in helping our students understand the interrelationships that exist in social thinking and social processing. To help our students understand the concepts outlined in this article, I developed two graphic representations of the thought processes used in working through social situations. The Spiral of Social Success summarizes these concepts:

• You will encounter some stress approaching this situation. In the past your anxiety would prompt you to bail out of this situation. Instead of starting by doubting yourself, explore what strategies you can use to help yourself deal with the uncomfortable social situation.
• Use your inner coach to remind yourself how much better you will feel once you use your strategies—that you are capable of using these strategies as well as choosing specific strategies to use.
• You feel better about yourself when you are demonstrating your abilities or social competencies.
• This encourages you to use the strategies.
• In doing so, you are training your brain that “you can do it” better than you have done it before!

Conversely, the Spiral of Social Failure illustrates what happens when our clients fail to embrace their social-learning–social-anxiety reducing strategies:

• You encounter the same stressful situation, one you previously avoided.
• Your anxiety prompts you to think of excuses for why you won’t engage in this situation today.
• Your self-defeater voice assures you that you can’t do it and that you have never been able to do it.
• You have negative emotions about your inability to get through this situation.
• You avoid putting yourself in the situation.
• You teach your brain one more time that you cannot do it! Your memory now reflects your inability and your self-defeater voice grows stronger.

The purpose of the Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure was to help our students understand how best to place the strategies they were learning in the context of their own functioning.

Our students helped us adjust the spirals so the wording more clearly matched their own experiences and emphasized how they related to the content of each spiral. This visual presentation paired with lessons that taught them the key concepts outlined in the graphics—increased accountability, self-learning, letting go of excuses, and embracing change—led to some very positive results.

They discovered they could choose positive behavioral responses to anxiety-laden situations and retrain their brains to learn new ways of acting and reacting. While the situations still caused anxiety, our clients gained confidence in attempting to push through their anxiety, further reinforced by the success they could achieve within the interaction. However, this learning process takes time. It may take years to help our students, through active learning of these strategies, to get them onto the Spiral of Social Success.

Some level of anxiety is inherent in every social situation we encounter. This set of strategies does not offer a cure for the anxiety experienced by individuals with social learning challenges. However, it can help minimize some of the anxiety by helping our students better appreciate how anxiety affects us and giving our students a toolbox of options to use when anxiety arises.

Such coping strategies are beneficial—not just for individuals with social learning challenges, but for us all!

Michelle Garcia Winner is the founder of Social Thinking®. She works in her clinic in San Jose, CA, has written numerous books, and speaks internationally. Visit her website, www.socialthinking.com, for more information.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Taken from the article “Social Anxiety and Social Skill Competencies” by Michelle Garcia Winner, Autism Asperger’s Digest, www.autismdigest.com

Note: Because this article is fairly long, I have broken it up into two parts. In Part I, Michelle outlines the key strategies she teaches for reducing social anxiety. I so appreciate her outlook on the responsibility of each individual to take ownership for what we need and want to improve in our social lives.

My goal was to find a way to help our clients decrease anxiety while increasing their social competencies. The result was a treatment strategy called the Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure.

I developed this approach for high-level teens and young adults who had first developed social competencies and were now ready to explore social anxiety. We discovered this teaching strategy helped motivate them to challenge their anxiety by giving them alternative strategies to use when stressed by specific social situations. An overview of the social concepts we shared with clients, as well as the description of the spirals, follows.

Social anxiety has deep tentacles; once it disrupts our functioning it likes to keep that power in place! Once it inhabits a person, anxiety will not go away without a fight. This means as our students recognize they have increased social competencies, they have to actively work at reducing their anxiety. This involves learned strategies, as well as their own shift in perception in making a choice in the moment: are you going to default to anxiety or use your strategies?

Some of the key social learning–social anxiety reduction strategies we teach our clients include:

1. Take ownership; be personally accountable for what you need to learn. After many years of working with adolescents, I realized that while I understood they had social learning differences, as long as I prompted them to use their strategies, I was the one taking ownership of their problems. Now I realize that as I teach them these strategies, they have to work at using them, which first means they have to realize these strategies are theirs and not ours (the teachers and parents).
2. Accept that your job is to become more comfortable with social discomfort. The neurotypical teen and adult world is filled with social discomfort. Using strategies does not mean our clients won’t feel discomfort. Their job is to work at learning how to be comfortable with the fact they will be uncomfortable socially at times! The mentor’s job is to encourage the client to use the treatment strategies even when experiencing discomfort.
3. Recognize and celebrate the small steps of progress being made. We need to help our students feel intrinsically proud of themselves for their progress. Avoid using token rewards for progress as these provide extrinsic but not intrinsic motivation.
4. Use your inner coach, rather than your self-defeater voice, inside your head. You and I use an “inner coach” or “private voice” in our heads to encourage and motivate ourselves through difficulties. Our inner coach may say to us: “You can do this!” “Just do it and get it over with!” “Remember last time this wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be, so just go do it!”
   Unfortunately, many of our students have a “self-defeater” voice in their heads. This voice discourages rather than encourages: “You’re bad at this.” “You’ve never been able to do this, so you won’t be able to do it now.” Individuals who have a loud self-defeater voice in their heads will default to avoiding the uncomfortable task at hand; those with an inner coach have a far better chance of pushing themselves through the uncomfortable task. We need to help our students be realistic about their strengths and challenges while reinforcing their choice to use their inner coach as much as possible.
5. Stop making excuses for avoiding social encounters. Those with strong self-defeater voices tend to find a lot of benign excuses for avoiding the task at hand. Many of our students don’t recognize that what they are saying is, in fact, an excuse for not pushing themselves through an uncomfortable moment. Instead, they automatically default to their excuses.
   Our strategy is to explore the personal excuses they make as we assign them tasks that provide opportunities to practice social competencies and use their anxiety-reducing strategies. Once students begin to notice and then take ownership of the fact they are making excuses, they further progress.
6. Your brain always learns; whether it learns positive or negative ways to cope, it is always learning! We discuss how our brains are always learning, all the time, that anytime we are awake we are learning from our experiences. If we “default” to what we are accustomed to doing, we constantly teach our brains we can only do it the way we have done it before. If students want to teach their brain a new set of skills, they have to try to do things differently.
   This idea may seem elementary, but it can be difficult for our concrete-thinking, rule-bound students to change the way they do things, especially their thinking patterns. I often ask them a direct question: “Do you want to teach your brain you can’t do something, or do you want to teach your brain you can do something?” Hopefully their answer is a “can-do” response, and we circle back to our other strategies to help them retrain their brain.

Watch for Part II of this guest article tomorrow, where Michelle illustrates her spirals of social success and social failure.

Michelle Garcia Winner is the founder of Social Thinking®. She works in her clinic in San Jose, CA, has written numerous books, and speaks internationally. Visit her website, www.socialthinking.com, for more information.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Taken from the article “Autism: From Mind Blindness to Context Blindness” by Peter Vermeulen, Nov/Dec 2011 Autism Asperger’s Digest, www.autismdigest.com

Note: You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Remember the scene in the movie, Rainman, where Raymond is trying to cross a street? In Raymond’s mind when the sign displays “Don’t walk,” it means only one thing: “Don’t walk.” We laugh when the sign changes from “Walk” to “Don’t walk” and Raymond stops in the middle of the intersection. Raymond does not understand that “Don’t walk” means many different things, depending on the situation or context. When you’re halfway through the crossing, it means “hurry up” instead!

Here is another example of context blindness: When the doorbell rang, the mother of a seven-year-old boy with autism asked him to open the door. He opened the back door instead of the front. His reaction was logical, but his choice of door was out of context.

Emotion recognition training is immensely popular in the field of autism. Typical materials used in this training are photographs or pictures of facial expressions of emotions. Although these materials can help children with autism learn about different emotions in a rote manner, they do not reflect emotion recognition as it happens in real life.

First, we rarely see faces out of context in real life. When we try to figure out what a person feels, we look at context as much as we do facial expression: the situation, what that person says, body language, our past experiences with similar situations, etc. In fact we don’t even need a facial expression to recognize emotions…. Studies on how people process facial expressions have shown that when we look at faces, our brains always spontaneously encode the context and that in certain instances, context plays an even bigger role in emotion recognition than the facial expression.

The second problem with traditional emotion recognition training is the underlying assumption that there is a direct relationship between an emotion and its facial expression. This assumption goes back to Darwin’s idea of universal expression of emotions in which each emotion has its own distinct facial expression. Unfortunately for people with autism, facial expressions are not that straightforward and quite often are ambiguous.

Take tears for instance. What do people feel when they have tears on their cheeks? It could mean sadness. But it could also mean happiness or pride. Or it could be an allergic reaction or the result of dicing an onion. How can a brain tell the difference? It uses context.

In recognizing emotions—the same is true for all mental states—the human brain relies on context. When people with autism find it hard to empathize, it is because their brain lacks contextual sensitivity. They are affected by context blindness, rather than mind blindness.

We can teach people with ASD a lot of rules and scripts, but for social understanding and competence to flourish, scripts and rules are insufficient. To effectively teach emotion recognition and social understanding to people with ASD, we must add context to the materials we teach. Even using a term such as “socially appropriate behavior” becomes misleading unless context is specified; behavior that is socially appropriate in one situation might be inappropriate in another context!

Social competence is not about knowing whether a certain behavior is socially appropriate or not, it is the knowledge of when that behavior is appropriate and when it is not.

Research has shown that more able people with ASD know quite a lot of social rules, but they have difficulty adapting these rules to changing contexts or making exceptions to the rules. Most social skill training programs focus on teaching generic social skills (e.g., how to start a conversation). However, having a conversation while waiting in the dentist’s waiting room or visiting someone at the hospital is quite different from the conversation you have hanging out with a group of buddies because the contexts are very different.

Instead of putting our focus on teaching social skills, we should focus on teaching social contexts such as visiting someone at the hospital or hanging out with friends. And then teach all the necessary rules, conversation, and behavior attached to a certain context. When you visit someone who is ill and in the hospital, what kind of present do you take? How long do you stay? What do you talk about? What should you say/not say?

The same logic about context applies to Social Stories™, a powerful tool to help people with autism navigate the social world. Instead of creating stories about certain social skills, we should build them around contexts and introduce sentences that start with if and when. In this manner a story can be adapted to different contexts. For instance, a social story about welcoming guests to your birthday party could contain the following contextual sentences:

• When the person who arrives is a close family member, you kiss them and say “hi.”
• When the person who arrives is not a close family member, you shake hands and say “hi.”

Social competence requires more than social skills; it demands contextual sensitivity— something difficult for people with ASD. Training programs designed to help people with ASD navigate the social world should therefore emphasize social contexts, not just focus on teaching social skills.

Peter Vermeulen, PhD, is a senior lecturer and consultant at Autisme Centraal in Gent, Belgium. He has written 15 books on autism, some of which have been translated into several languages.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. Added emphasis is mine.

I haven’t written much about our daily lives lately – there has actually been so much going on that it’s been hard to distill it into a coherent blog post. The other day I woke up early and was thinking about where Michael is with things right now and what I want to focus on in the immediate future.

So, please take this as a reflection of my thoughts about our personal situation at the moment and not an editorial on how anyone else should think or act with regard to their own child.

Third grade so far has been a highly positive experience for all of us. Michael’s teacher is extremely good, and the whole team seems to be working together quite well towards the goal of encouraging Michael towards more independence in his organizational skills as well as self-regulation.

Of course, there is always the tendency to move too fast towards lowering the level of reinforcement and support. When people see success, they seem to want to breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Okay, that’s taken care of.” But I see it as a much more gradual process. I think the first sigh of relief should be that we have found a level of support that is appropriate for him right now and that we should continue at that level until he is clearly showing that he doesn’t need it so much.

When anyone on Michael’s team mentions pulling back in any way, I tend to panic and react negatively to the suggestion, not because I don’t have the same desires as they do for his independence, but because I instinctively sense that he needs an extremely gradual transition towards a different kind of support than he is currently getting.

(Ironically, the day after I wrote this the Learning Support Teacher was talking about lengthening the interval at which Michael earns checkmarks toward his rewards. For now, we are just going from 3 minutes to 5 minutes, so that should be a negligible change for him.)

Notice that I say “different kind of support.” He will still need support from other people – we all need that in our lives.

One reason for this is because of his maturity level, especially in terms of emotional and social functioning. Another is that he is not at the point where he can always identify when he needs additional help or ask for it if he does realize it. That skill is one of the most important ones I can think of for him to learn, actually.

As I am writing this, I am thinking that another thing I need to emphasize more with him is that everyone needs help and support from other people, to varying degrees based on what is happening in their lives. Pointing out to Michael when others are asking for help or making mistakes or struggling to learn a new skill helps him see that everyone has difficulties at times and that it is actually a sign of maturity to know when to ask for help.

I think a lot of his “self-regulation” issues come down to this perception that he should be able to do everything right and win all the time and understand everything immediately, and that when things don’t go the way he expected, he has trouble identifying what is happening and then either communicating it to someone or figuring out what to do about it.

So (and pardon me as I use my writing to think through the issue), perhaps my focus should be more on helping him to notice and understand what is going on around him so that he can engage in more communication and interactions that are meaningful for him.

This may sound sort of touchy-feely, so let me say that I definitely think it is critical to provide clear instruction on “expected behaviors” and related topics, and that using tangible reinforcements for motivation on non-preferred tasks meets his needs at the moment. And these strategies are incredibly useful to get through the school day, and for structured events in the home and community.

Sometimes I wonder if I am being hypocritical by advocating for such a high level of support at school, while tending towards a more natural interaction at home. But ultimately I don’t think I am, for several reasons:
1. School is by its very nature a more structured environment, with many people who all need to work together in a safe and responsible manner to accomplish specific goals.
2. There is less time and opportunity to provide the in-depth explanations and time to process situations within the constraints of the school day.
3. A teacher with a class full of students cannot possibly attend to all of the signals that Michael may not be paying full attention or understanding the dynamics of what is going on or even that something is upsetting to him. (His current teacher is by far the best at this that I have seen, but it’s a completely different situation than him being with just me or with a therapist one-on-one.)

Recognizing these things has helped me gain a better perspective for myself on what I advocate for school supports. At home, I may not need to provide such a high level of reinforcement*, simply because I am able to focus more intently on his needs at that moment, whether it be adjusting the environment or having an in-depth conversation about perception versus reality.

At school or in a more structured community setting, he needs the higher level of reinforcement to motivate him to accept what is happening around him or what he is being asked to do as necessary, even if he doesn’t like or understand it completely. And learning that different situations and environments have different rules and expectations is a good thing too.

Edited to add: *Re-reading this, I think I should say I don’t need to provide as much tangible reinforcement such as physical rewards or a token economy, but can rely more on social and emotional reinforcers.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists!

My Teaser

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism by Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron

I have just started this book, so the quote is from what is titled as Act One, Scene One, which is the chapter expressing Temple’s perspective on social thinking:

Sometimes the impediment to a child developing social skills lies as much with the perspectives of the adult trying to teach the child as it does with the innate lack of social sense the child brings to the interaction…. Admitting that their child may never develop the emotional relatedness of a neurotypical person feels more like failure than it does acknowledging simply “another way of being.”

I am really looking forward to getting into the actual rules (of which they have ten).

What are you reading right now?

Check out Should Be Reading for more Teaser Tuesdays!

For a compilation of some of the best posts on social and play skills related to children with hidden disabilities, visit the S-O-S Best of the Best, Edition 2: Social & Play Skills.

There are some amazing bloggers represented in this list, both parents and professionals, and I am honored to be included among them with my post about the playgroup Michael attends.

You can also find information on the next two topics and details on how to submit a post for consideration in an upcoming Best of the Best at Help! S-O-S for Parents blog.

This summer has been an interesting one, sort of like a seesaw with Michael on one end and me on the other. (You have to suspend your disbelief to make it actually work despite our size difference!)

Let me explain what I mean:

Michael on the Upswing

For the first five weeks of the summer, Michael went to a babysitter’s home. Bonnie is a special education teacher who wanted to do some childcare this summer and responded to my ad on Care.com (a wonderful site, by the way). She was drawn to the picture I posted of him and felt that he was the one she was supposed to take care of this summer.

It was truly a match made in heaven. Bonnie was willing not only to deal graciously with Michael’s meltdown and quirks, but also to work on specific skills such as playing games appropriately with others to have fun and to show good sportsmanship. This is a big struggle for him, and between Bonnie, the TSS, and Bonnie’s two children, who are 12 and 13, they made some good progress.

Even the psychologist who runs his playgroup remarked that he is more focused when playing games and is ready to take his turn, as well as accepting others’ choices about what to play more agreeably. He still has trouble with losing, but is learning to better moderate his words and behaviors.

Although I was completely thrilled with the arrangements and would do it again in a heartbeat, I have to admit there were some downsides to those weeks. I was driving back and forth across the river twice a day, often in very heavy traffic, and filling up my gas tank about every 5 days in addition to paying her. I had no down time, as I was picking him up directly after work and often driving then to a therapy appointment or other activity.

And Now It’s My Turn

Again, this second part of the summer isn’t all bad for Michael; it’s just better for me.

Right now, Michael is going to STAP, which stands for Summer Therapeutic Activities Program and is funded through Medical Assistance. He has been to this particular one before and is thrilled to finally be in the big kids’ room, but he doesn’t like it as much as going to Bonnie’s house. There are a lot more demands on him for appropriate social interaction in a more structured setting with a lot less flexibility and choice in terms of what he wants to do.

For me, however, it’s great! The van picks him up at the house in the morning and brings him home in the afternoon. Since the program is 6 hours, the travel time brings it to 7 hours or more out of the house each day. I go to work for four hours and then can run errands, come home and work on things around the house or just take a rest if I need one.

We are continuing with OT but taking a break from playgroup until STAP is over, so we don’t even have as many places to go. And I think this summer has worked out well because he did get a relatively unstructured break but is now getting back into a routine that is closer to what happens at school. And even though they focus on social skills and not academics, they do have them doing some form of writing or art every day.

Now if I can just get him to work on that darn packet the second grade teachers sent home to be finished by the first day of school!

Oh, yeah, and I still don’t know what I’m going to do with him for the week between the end of STAP and the beginning of school. (Any local moms interested/available for 25 hours the last week of August? I don’t even care if I have to drive across the river, honestly!!)

We recently had our church life group leaders over for dinner.  They have four adorable children, three of whom you see here with Michael towering over them!  It was a wonderful evening.  This couple, and the entire group, have been so welcoming to us and are such a blessing.

We had been trying to get together for a while, but life kept intervening.  Well, the timing worked out perfectly because just a couple of days later, we went to a birthday party that this family also attended.  Michael didn’t want to go because he has very strong ideas about what a birthday party should entail (namely party games and goodie bags, neither of which were going to be at this event, which was a potluck for a friend who just turned 40).

I offered to let him take his portable DVD player and sit in the back watching a movie through headphones.  He sat there contented by himself while we all ate, but later I looked back and the three older kids from our leaders’ family plus a couple of others had congregated around him and were intently watching Dora.

Yes, he was off in his own world, but this time he had company!

Monday night, Michael had his first group therapy session with the psychologist. We arrived a few minutes late, but luckily the three other boys were still in the waiting room playing with Legos.

Michael was very excited to be meeting other boys who, in his words, “think like me and are my same age too.” Makes me wonder why we all push so hard for inclusion with typical peers all the time.

Now, I’m not saying anything against inclusion—we all live in this world and need to work together and help each other—I’m just saying it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to seek opportunities to be with people who are similar to you. After all, isn’t that what we all do? We visit different churches to find the one that fits our style; we try to find common ground with people we meet to see if they have the same views or background or even hobbies.

Ideally, he can begin to have these opportunities not just as part of a therapy session, but as part of his everyday life. That reminds me, I need to email the mom of the boy he met at the last ASA meeting to arrange a playdate.

As an update to my frustration with the increasing meltdowns, the psychologist suggested that I may actually need to keep a tighter rein on the schedule and freedoms at home and to make sure I am giving clear and immediate feedback on both good and bad behavior. I have been somewhat relaxed at home, thinking this will allow him to focus more when he is at school, but it appears to be backfiring on me.