Teaching social skills games

Coming up with new ways to spend time together increases problem-solving abilities, which adds to a set of vital social skills. Emotion charades involves writing different emotions on strips of paper. Your child picks one out of a hat or bucket. Then, they must try to act out that emotion. Emotion charades can help children learn to recognize emotions using facial and body cues. You can even adapt social skills activities like this to create a game similar to Pictionary, where children draw the emotion.

By depicting and acting out emotional expressions and reactions in social skills activities, children learn emotion management, which plays an important role in creating positive relationships and communicating feelings. When you play this game with your child, you're teaching social skills with expressions.

Mimicking your expressions allows your child to understand what certain expressions mean and recognize them when others make them in real conversations. When kids with social challenges learn to read facial expressions, they become more comfortable in situations involving them. You can play several variations of the topic game, but the most common one involves choosing a topic and naming things that fit into that category using each letter of the alphabet.

For example, if you choose animals as the topic, you might come up with:. The topic game teaches kids to stick to one subject and follow directions until they complete the activity. It also helps them make connections and get creative with letters that have fewer options. Step Into Conversation is a card game made for children with autism. The game presents structured social skills activities, like starting a conversation and talking about specific subjects based on cards.

The game helps kids learn how to talk to others appropriately and carry a conversation with perspective and empathy. It teaches good manners and self-control by showing them how to politely enter a conversation, when to talk, and when to listen. By using socialization games like this one, you give structure to conversations to develop the social skills necessary to handle different situations in their daily life.

Many children tell stories even outside of intentional social skills activities. With improvisational stories, you add another challenge that requires them to collaborate and create a narrative without thinking about it beforehand. Conversation balls are great tools to help kids know about each other. There are several ways to play with them. You usually toss the ball and look under your thumb the question you need to answer.

You can choose one of the questions and toss the ball around so that the kids wait for their turn to answer that question. Our post about social skills activities for kids will be a useful addition to our social skills game list.

Your email address will not be published. Share Tweet Pin. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. This game introduces younger children to the basic of playing games and a few important social skills:.

Do you remember playing Guess Who as a kid? This was a favorite of mine. Kids take turns asking yes or no questions about the features of the characters on the cards, narrowing down the possibilities until they can guess which character card the other player has.

You ask the other players questions to determine which card you have. The game comes with a timer, and during your turn you ask as many yes or no questions as you can before the timer runs out. This aspect helps kids practice working under pressure, which many people find stressful. This is a well known classic. To play Jenga , you must remove wooden blocks from the tower and place them on top, without the tower toppling over. Charades is a fun to play game for all ages and helps kids build social skills such as:.

Getting kids talking about emotions is key. Using the Uno colors, discuss what each of the colors might mean. Blue can stand for feeling sad, tired, bored, or sick. Green stands for feeling happy, calm, focused, and in control. Yellow means feelings frustrated, worried, or nervous. Finally, red should stand for angry. Every time a student plays a color of a card, teach them to use an emotion word that matches the color, share a time they felt that way, or discuss when someone might feel that way.

Executive Functioning Challenge. Our executive functioning skills help us use our self-control to stop and think before saying something inappropriate, our flexibility to consider different solutions for social problems, and our time management to make sure we meet a friend on time. When executive functioning skills are stronger, kids and young adults have greater chance for success in school and beyond. How It Works: This game can actually be played two different ways: partners and small groups, or as a full class.

The idea is that students work through a game board, answering a variety of executive functioning questions as they head towards the finish line. The game cards have students completing executive functioning challenges, acting out situations, naming executive functioning skills used in a situation, and proving their knowledge about the skills themselves. This Social Emotional Learning Games Bundle gives practice with empathy, perspective-taking, executive functioning skills, communication, and more.

Use these games during break times, small groups, as an end of the week reward, or just a fun brain break. So glad you like the ideas! Just click on the picture and it should take you right there! This looks like exactly what we need. Love these game ideas. How can I get these games for my students? I teach Kindergarten ED and we get in social skills lessons everyday! I would love to surprise them with a game board!

Hi Sam! Some of the games, like Pictionary and Uno, are things you can grab on Amazon or Target. Some of the other games are ones I created.