Social Story Poster

Well, I am back at school and things are in full swing.  At my school the teachers are busy getting their rooms ready, I am working on scheduling students, and we are all racking up our professional development hours.  This past week we spent time discussing student rules, common area expectations, and a positive approach to classroom behavior management.  It was just a great refresher on how important managing student behavior is in creating a safe and successful learning environment. 

I want to expand on my last post discussing social stories.  Social stories are a great behavior intervention tool to use for those students that are showing us that they need a little extra help.  I want to take social stories one step further though.  What about turning the pages of the story into a poster specific to the student?  It doesn't have to be anything huge or fancy, just something small that you can tape to a desk, locker, folder, etc.  What a great way to provide a friendly visual reminder.  I used the pages from my Classroom Behavior Social Story to make an example poster.

I wish all of you the best of luck getting this school year off to a good start.  Don't forget how important it is to establish your rules and procedures from the get go.  Spend the first 2-3 weeks practicing your expectations.  Hopefully it will save you some time and frustration dealing with behavior problems down the road!



Social Stories

Social stories are simple, short stories that help set social skills and self care expectations.  They are beneficial to use with special education students, those struggling with behavior, and/or students on the autism spectrum.  If you are writing your own social stories here are a few tips:

• Keep the language simple and easy to understand.  Consider the reading level of the student that you are targeting.
• Keep the text literal.
• Pictures are important.  You can insert clipart or have the student illustrate the story.  Also, taking pictures of the student correctly demonstrating the behavior and then inserting those pictures into the story is an effective method of providing visuals.
• Keep in mind the purpose of the story.  What behavior or social skill is being targeted?  How it might make the student feel?  What might the student think?

I recently have added a packet on TpT that provides a bank of pages for classroom behavior social skills. 

This packet includes illustrated pages:

This packet also includes editable pages to allow students to illustrate.  Or, the user can insert actual pictures of the student in the story.



For more information on what is included, visit my TpT store.  If you are writing your own social story good luck and have fun creating!