Practicing Social Skills

When our children are learning multiplication, we often quiz them on the facts.  For upcoming spelling tests, we help teach our children word patterns and chunking strategies so they can learn them.  When building reading fluency, we practice reading with our children at night on books of interest and talk about the story to build their comprehension.  It’s beautiful and rewarding when we get to be a part and see our children begin doing these skills on their own.  They have now learned them.

Teaching social skills is no different.  When a child is missing strategies and hidden social cues, often times, adults get frustrated around him/her because we expect the child to know what to do.   We think….why is my child struggling socially when we’ve talked about this so many times?

The fact is, some children miss learning those social skills intutivitley.  We often take for granted that we have these skills so we wonder why our child is struggling?  Tthe good news is that a child can be taught social skills cognitively.  Just like teaching a child a chunking strategy for remembering a longer spelling word, he/she can be taught strategies on how to find those “hidden” social cues in different environments and be taught skills on how to navigate them. It’s beautiful and rewarding when we get to be a part of and see our children begin using these skills on their own.  They have now learned them and continue to grow their social thinking.

Our next set of social classes begin next Sunday, October 8th.  Each session is six-weeks. You can find specific details here Registration for Social Skills Classes October 8th-November 12th

Our door is always open. If you have questions or would like to find out more about our classes to see if it’s a good fit for your family, please reach out to us at confidentsolutions7@gmail.com.

With Appreciation,

Christina and Wendy

How To Find Past Posts

Do you know that we have written over 55 posts?  There is a lot of great information on our website but we are still navigating an easier way for you to find it.  For now, if you go to our homepage and scroll down slightly you will see a sidebar on the right hand side that says “Archives.”   August through January will be listed.  When you click on a specific month, the posts that we have made during that time will be listed.

For August, we have written information on knowing your forms, differences between 504s and IEPs, what to do if your child is struggling in school.  Here are a couple of direct links from August 504 and IEP’s: What’s the difference? and Know Your Forms-Referral For Help

In September, you can access posts about how to make connections with students, resources for schools, and our mission.  Here are a couple of direct links to September’s posts  Please Don’t Say “It Will Be Okay” and Know Your Forms-IEPs

When you browse through October’s posts, you will find information on how to teach our children to be includers, what can you do if your Team doesn’t agree on a decision in a meeting, what schools can’t tell you in meetings, and who benefits from social skills classes.  Here are a couple of direct links Who Benefits From Social Skills Classes? and Executive Functioning Skills

November we introduced our Middle School OTB (outside of the box) Club and wrote details about what and how to perform a Functional Behavioral Analysis.  You can find those here Middle Schoolers OTB (Outside The Box) Club and Functional Behavior Analysis (FBA)

In December, we wrote about the importance of assuming positive intent first Assume Positive Intent, school choices in North Carolina School Choice and how to formally request an evaluation from your child’s public school Requesting an Evaluation.

Also, as you browse through past posts, you will find photography paired with inspirational quotes.  We also offer a free monthly parent/ guardian class on understanding the components to an IEP.  We are excited to be hosting a Mindfulness class taught by Maria Hartemann once a month. Our six week session of social skills classes begin this upcoming Sunday. All monthly events are listed under the tab “Upcoming Events” at the top of our website. Check us out on FB as well! We are trying to “go live” once a week with answering questions that have been e-mailed to us.  Do you have a topic that you would like to hear more about? Send us an e-mail at confidentsolutions7@gmail.com.  We love connecting with you!

With Appreciation,

Christina and Wendy

Resource for Schools

We both love organization and being able to find what we need quick and easily.  Especially when it comes to paperwork. We have created these forms for schools to use within EC files.  “Unit 1” will clip together a full set of paperwork for a child.  From there, you can divide the sets of paperwork with the cover sheet of Unit 2.  We have used these in the past and NCDPI has commented to us how helpful it was when going through EC files.  Once the paperwork is put in each child’s folder, you can put one of these cover sheets to divide each section.  You can print it on colored paper to see it clearly, or use a binder clip at the bottom to clip each section together.  We recommend having the newest paperwork on top and then progressing down from there.  Typically, your first unit will be at the bottom  of the file.

Please let us know if you have any questions or need help organizing your EC files in your school.

unit-1-cs

following-units-2-cs

With Appreciation,

Christina and Wendy