There have been a TON of Super Duper product reviews cropping up lately, so I was thrilled when Carrie contacted me to review Simply Social 7 at School. This is a great product for SLPs who are working with students in grades 2-12.
While this was delivered a few weeks ago, it has taken me some time to learn about the product and figure out how to use it. I wanted to provide you with a detailed review, so this will be a fairly long post. I was contacted to review this product, but the following opinions and ideas are all mine.
Simply Social 7 at School is a book filled with activities
that teaches and develops students’ social skills. Overall it incorporates over
fifty social skills that are important for students to learn. Some of the
skills are basic skills (following directions, using greetings, and taking
turns) and some of the skills are more in-depth and challenging (understanding
figurative language, understanding facial expressions, and adjusting your
language level).
The social skills are broken up into six categories: introductory
skills, conversational skills, academic skills, relationship skills, conflict
management skills, and emotional communication skills.
Introductory skills includes skills like being aware of your
surroundings, using manners, making eye contact, respecting personal space, and
more.
Conversational skills includes skills like using greetings
and gestures, staying on topic/switching topics, adjusting your language level,
and expressing opinions, and more.
Academic skills includes skills like following rules, paying
attention, dealing with transition, asking/answering questions, and getting the
teacher’s attention, and more.
Relationship skills includes skills like making and
maintaining friendships, giving advice, asking for help/helping others, working
with others in a group, and taking another’s perspective, and more.
Conflict management skills includes skills like accepting
“no”, accepting consequences, dealing with failure, resolving conflict, accepting
constructive criticism, and accepting discipline.
Emotional communication skills includes skills like
understanding facial expressions and emotions, expressing feelings, dealing
with anger, using humor, and dealing with change.
The program starts with a parent/helper letter that explains
what social skills are and what the program involves. The student will be
responsible for bringing home worksheets to target these social skills, and the
parent should either review the pages with the student, sign the page, and the
student should return the worksheet indicating that they completed the work, or
the parent should simply review the worksheets with the student and keep the
sheets at home in a safe folder.
Parent Letter
Each separate topic includes a page that teaches the social
skill in steps, a Look and Learn page that has a cartoon that demonstrates the
social skill, a Think and Review page that includes discussion questions, a
Take-Home Practice page for parents that discusses what the student has learned
and how the parent should review the skill with their child, and it finally
includes a superstar that is given to the student when he/she demonstrates
mastery of that skill. This star can be used as motivation or as a reward for
the student.
Simply Social 7 includes a social skills checklist that aids
in identifying a student’s social strengths and challenges. This is a great
tool to use to identify a student’s baseline performance for specific skills.
Then, the SLP can determine which social skills to target with the student.
Finally, the SLP can use this checklist as a criterion-referenced posttest.
Example of a part of the social skills checklist.
The checklist simply asks if the student demonstrates a specific skill. You would select yes or no. If you need more room, then there is room at the bottom of the page to write specific details.
This checklist would be given to two other observers (a parent and a teacher for example) in addition to the SLP.
Pros:
This program addresses so many social skills that are necessary
for school.
The Take-Home Practice page can be customized to allow for
easily explanations to parents on how they can help their child practice these
social skills.
The Look and Learn pages have cartoons on them that are
engaging to students.
The social skills checklist is an excellent tool for
observation and for determining which social skills the student needs to
develop and master. There is also a checklist summary that would be great to
use for discussion at an IEP/evaluation meeting.
Cons:
The printable CD-ROM that is included with the program is
simply the same workbook but on CD. It would have been nice if there were
additional practice sheets for each skill on the CD.
It’s seems quite easy to complete one social skill during
one session (if you’re working with a student individually), so it would be
nice if there were more activities in the workbook (or even ideas for hands-on
activities) for each skill so that it could be spread across two-three therapy
sessions to ensure mastery of the social skill.
Overall, I would highly recommend this product for SLPs who
are working on social skills with their students. This workbook is very
comprehensive, and it includes some great tools to use during the assessment
and treatment of pragmatics. This would be a great product to use to introduce
specific social skills to the students, but it would require you to generate
some additional activities to truly target and master each social skill.
Check out the product here! Super Duper typically sells the item for $34.95, but it is currently on sale for $17.48 until Sunday, June 3. That's a savings of $17.47!
