Social Skills=Success

Recently I had the opportunity of working at the TRIAD Social Skills Camp at Vanderbilt University. TRIAD Summer Camp provides an integrated social skills program that is designed specifically for children and youth with autism spectrum disorders between the ages of 7 and 21 who have language and reading skills. Social skills is something that we often take for granted because we learn them as we develop and it just comes naturally for us. Many people with high functioning Autism are very bright but lack the social skills to be successful in life. I find it very sad that these people who are so bright cannot hold a job due to their lack of social skills. I worked with the elementary students and the curriculum developed for this camp was based around the book: Superflex: A Superhero Social Thinking Curriculum. Superflex is the comic hero in the story and he has to fight off the team of unthinkables that are constantly trying to get into his brain. These unthinkables include:
Rock Brain: He makes people get stuck on their ideas
Wasfunnyonce: He gets people to use humor at the wrong time
Space Invader: He gets people to invade other people's space
Body Snatcher: He gets people to move away from the group
Topic Twistermeister: He get people to change topics to only what they want to talk about.
There are a total of 14 unthinkables and the book comes with comic books, worksheets, and activities that can help these students learn important social skills in a way that they can understand. A lot of people in society think these people with Autism/Aspergers are "different" because they lack the social skills that most of us take for granted. However, they have to be taught these skills because they don't acquire them like most of us do. I was really touched by an interview that was shown during our pre-camp training of a teenager girl with Aspergers and she was explaining her thoughts about social skills. She said she did not know where everyone else gets these social skills and its like everyone can just pull them out of thin air except for her. She said people at her school never talked to her because they thought she was weird and she knew that bad people did not have friends so she must be a bad person. We need to realize that these people want friends they just don't know how to make friends because they lack the important social skills that can make them so successful.
Until we meet again,
Mallory

P.S. The Superflex Curriculum can be purchased at www.socialthinking.com