Social Thinking: Introducing Perspective Taking
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Part of the social thinking program is teaching perspective-taking. This can be a rather difficult skill to teach to students who are more rigid in their thinking.
Perspective-taking is one of the lessons in the book “Thinking About You, Thinking About Me” (pictured below). I have to admit, when I got this book, it was a little overwhelming to me. Having time over this winter break to delve into a little is great, because I never really have the kind of time I’d like when school is in session. I decided to try out an activity with one of my private clients.
One part of the book describes the differences between an Emerging Perspective Taker and an Impaired Interactive Perspective Taker. My client has some qualities of both, but seems to be more of Emerging Perspective Taker. I knew that I would need to adapt this lesson a little for this specific client. I wrote 5 different people on pieces of paper: mom, doctor, waiter, cashier, and friend. I write comments that each person might say on some speech bubbles that I found (free) and cut them out. Click on the picture below to grab a copy of the speech bubbles.
You could also use these cute ready to go sticky note speech bubbles:
Then I laid out the “people” labels and we decided which person might make each comment. This led to great discussion because some of them actually could’ve been made by more than one person. At the end of the activity, it looked like this:
I think I’ll definitely be trying this out with some of my other kids. We talked about how sometimes we need to take the perspective of another person. I think this was a good way to introduce the topic. More to come!!