Activities for "You Are A Social Detective…"

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Recently I brought you my review of You Are A Social Detective: Explaining Social ThinkingⓇ to Kids by Michelle Garcia Winner and Pamela Crooke... and now I am FINALLY getting around to sharing all of the cool activities we did to go with that book! Woot! If you don't have this book in your SLP toolbox…well…you should.

The first part of the book starts out talking about different kinds of smarts…so I created this anchor chart to introduce the topic to my kids. We brainstormed different places we use our social smarts at school.

Then I got this idea from Speech Room News, to have each of my students create their own brain, with their smarts. They chose 3 strong smarts and 3 weak smarts. All I did was google 'brain picture worksheet' and found one I could drag into a Word document as a picture. Then I added some lines at the bottom for the kids to list where they use Social Smarts.

Another concept introduced in the book is Expected and Unexpected Behaviors. I created a few of these paddles for my kids to practice identifying the behaviors. I just added some decorative tape to popsicle sticks and added the circles with the vocabulary to the top. Super easy and the kids LOVED judging the behaviors using these!

I also created a worksheet for some of my intermediate kids to use and write down Expected/Unexpected behaviors, with just clip art pics from Word with various locations like classroom, hallway, etc. They recorded behaviors on the chart under the correct column…and they keep this in their folder. They have even been known to add to it occasionally :)

I also used this skill in my Intergalactic Social Skills unit, which the kids LOVED. You can find it HERE.

We also took a detour with my first graders to talk about Whole Body Listening. They made their own self portrait and labeled what their body should be doing when they are listening.

Towards the end of the book it talks bout each person's Smart Guess Toolbox…so, of course, we made our own! I gathered pictures of ears, brains, eyes, and hearts, then created a label to put on the outside of a 11x17 piece of construction paper. I folded the construction paper into thirds to create a 'box'. Yes, it was more like a folder. Yes, they were sure to let me know if was definitely not a box. Flexible thinking, friends.

I also created a little reminder for each tool to glue inside with the body parts. It said "I use my eyes to_______.' and they filled in the blank. They got to take this home and share with their families about making Smart Guesses!

I hope you can use some of these activities in your room too! I'd love to hear your ideas…leave me a comment to let me know what you are doing to teach your kids to be Social Detectives!