I've been distracted, so it's taken awhile. Actually I suspect that school has me worn and when I come home I do not want to engage in deep thought or deep reading. I just finished Elizabeth A. Sautter's book Make Social and Emotional Learning Stick! Second Edition. This book is designed as a collection of easily usable strategies for people to use with children from, let's say, preschool through elementary school. As the subtitle suggests it provides "practical activities to help your child manage emotions, navigate social situations & reduce anxiety." Clearly the book targets young people on the spectrum or with social processing concerns.
The book has three parts:
-Activities which lists hundreds of ideas for meeting the goal of the text
-Appendix which contains reproduceable reproducibles and examples of how to implement some of the ideas.
The activity section is a tremendous resource. First it is divided into places/times for each activity. For example, the holiday/special event group includes ideas for Thanksgiving, birthday parties and vacations. Ms. Sautter provides 3-5 idea on a page of ways to help teach your child a skill or manage a situation such as waiting in line and flexible thinking. The ideas are sourced from both Sautter's work and that of some big names in the field such as Sarah Ward, Michelle Garcia Winner, and Rick Lavoie. The format of these pages has each idea in a box. You might copy a page, post it on your refrigerator and use it to remind you to look for times to utilize the idea. On many of the the activity pages are comments about the hidden rules of social situations. These are overarching ideas children may need to be explicitly taught in order to successfully function in society.
An easy to use resource for anyone working with students in this age group. Definitely a good one to have on the shelf.
