What is Grey Area Thinkers?
Blog
My Thoughts and Musings.
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Welcome!
Hello, and welcome to my blog! I have been working extensively in social thinking for most of my career as an occupational therapist, mainly in schools.
I’ve done work with whole classrooms, but my main focus for the last few years has been small groups & individual sessions, and how to make those sessions work in the schools. Now I decided to branch out into the community to provide services to people who may not have access to social thinking!
After completing Social Thinking Clinical Training in January 2018, I realized that beyond the Social Thinking conferences (which I love btw), there was no other real formal training that I could get!
So in July 2019, I decided to volunteer at the Social Thinking-Stevens Creek clinic to learn more about groups and different strategies that I could take back with me to Edmonton. It was truly a fantastic experience.
I learned so much and I now have wonderful people in San Jose that I can consult with. I will be sharing various articles, strategies, and activities on this blog, so please be sure to check back here soon! -
A New Strategy
Here is a strategy that I was introduced to at Social Thinking-Stevens Creek!
This is the levels of like rating scale. You can use this in a variety of ways-the example I provided was for playground games. You could give each student a colored post-it and ask them to rate different things (gym games to play, things to play a recess, basically anything that can be rated) and this will give you a visual way to see what others prefer in comparison to themselves.
For example, I put soccer at hate, but the rest of my class put soccer at LOVE, then maybe I need to be flexible with my plan and play soccer. Or if you have a smaller group, and one kid puts soccer at love and one kid puts it at hate BUT they both put kickball at love-then kickball is the game to play!
IMPORTANT: if the student has never tried the thing, it automatically will go to okay because you have no information to make a smart guess of how you will actually feel about it, so you have to try it a few times before you can properly rate it! -
Self Regulation
This popped up on my Instagram and I think it's a really important reminder that self-regulation is a complex and multi-layered skill that takes time, patience and teaching to help kids master. It's not as easy as saying "control yourself"!