Higher Functioning Autism (HFA), Asperger Syndrome and Social Communication
How functionally independent is your teen with HFA?  
How socially appropriate is your teen with HFA?
Does your teen have coping skills for anxiety and frustration?

Strategies our Social Thinking Groups will focus on:

  • Recognizing expected and unexpected behaviors
  • Recognizing the “gray” areas (hidden curriculum) of the social world
  • Learning to reference and interpret social situations
  • Attempting to take on another person’s perspective
  • Recognize “small” talk and how to join in a conversation
  • Recognizing talking “with” vs. “at”
  • Recognizing what to say, how much to say and when to say
  • Recognizing "what to do" and "when to do" or NOT!
  • Referencing body language
  • Recognizing what is funny or NOT and to include where and when
  • Referencing their words and actions and how it affects others
  • Recognizing that everyone has thoughts and feelings about others all the time
  • Understanding the implications of their unexpected behavior (when applicable) in regards to how it will affect their adult life and possibly put them in danger of being placed in the legal system.

Persons w/ social cognition challenges who are also extremely intelligent can be limited in their ability to:

  • Reference social situations going on around them
  • Interpret the most basic non-verbal and verbal social cues
  • Infer what others could be thinking in a particular situation
  • Take on another person’s perspective

Specific skills most people “get” intuitively need to be taught in detail to a person on the autism spectrum. They tend to need a step by step process to develop and begin to learn to generalize these social skills.  Developing social communication skills with specific direct group instruction to include visual strategies i.e. roleplaying, scripting, video modeling, social stories, social mapping, social rules and more is essential for overall functional independence.  These SC Groups will provide this type of programming.  

TRAINED PEERS in all Teen Social Thinking Groups and Individual Sessions!

Picture
Click to read a letter written from one of our peer mentors, Katy!
Sabra Evans is a firm believer in the power of trained, same age peers as social models participating in our social skills groups.  Sabra Evans spends time to train them beforehand with the knowledge and skills they need to create a successful skill building environment.  

Blog Post-March 2