Everyone needs a level of social awareness and skills to get by in today’s world. However, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may find it difficult to cope with daily living due to their lack of social skills.
ABA Therapy at home provides a personalized approach to enhancing these social skills in a comfortable and familiar environment, making the learning process more effective and less stressful.
In this article, we’ll go over how social skill worksheets can help people with autism.
Why are Worksheets Helpful for People With Autism?
People on the spectrum often find it challenging to learn new things or interact with others using casual language.
For instance, children with autism may not be able to discern social cues, such as when to begin a conversation, how to react when others make social approaches, and how to adapt to unspoken social rules quickly. Fortunately, with the aid of a social skills worksheet, individuals with ASD can learn various social skills and how to use them in real-life situations.
Worksheets are helpful learning tools for individuals with autism. Because these worksheets provide visual aid, they are effective for teaching people, especially children on the autism spectrum.
Going forward, we’ll examine the relationship between social skills and autism spectrum disorder.
Socials Skills and Autism
Although the impact of autism spectrum disorder varies from person to person, difficulties with facets of social interaction, like communication, social connection, and relationship forming, are common among people on the autism spectrum.
Because social communication is often difficult for people with ASD, they may struggle to hold meaningful conversations or build social connections.
Even though most individuals on the autism spectrum are willing to socialize, they may not know how to relate with friends or may even become overwhelmed in social situations.
Naturally, communication goes deeper than spoken words and verbal messages, as people tend to interact more without saying anything. In fact, a 2010 PMC study shows that about 60% to 65% of human communication is conveyed through non-verbal behaviors.
These non-verbal behaviors, referred to as social norms or cues, are a significant part of social interaction. For example, in the United States, attending to others during a conversation is a social norm, and anyone who does not conform to this standard may be perceived as shy, nervous, or even odd.
People on the spectrum usually find it hard to recognize and adhere to social norms and cues, causing challenges with socialization.
Hence, you must ensure that social skills and cues are taught to your child with autism at home and school to help them get along with others, boost their self-esteem, and become more independent.
There are various social skills to teach your kid on the autism spectrum. This article highlights these skills that neurodivergent children need to interact with their surrounding world just as well as their neurotypical peers.
What Social Skills to Work On
You can teach your child who is on the autism spectrum to relate better with others by getting them to improve on these social skills:
- Maintaining eye contact during conversations with other people.
- Understanding facial expressions and body language.
- Discerning what other people are thinking and feeling.
- Forging and maintaining healthy relationships.
- Recognizing boundaries and respecting others’ personal space.
- Knowing how the concept of turn-taking works in a social setting or gathering.
- Using the appropriate voice tone and volume during various types of conversations.
- Adapting to new, unexpected social situations.
- Knowing how to resolve conflict, disagree with other people politely, and respect other people’s opinions.
- Sharing interests and cooperating with other people.
- Recognizing and understanding unwritten social rules and non-verbal cues.
Teaching your child with autism how to interact socially is essential, and a social skills worksheet is one of the most effective ways to do this. Continue reading this piece to find out how and why.
What are Social Skills Worksheets?
Simply put, a social skills worksheet is a material created to teach children with autism and other disabilities how to interact and engage with others in their environment. Given that most children, especially kids on the spectrum, learn better with visual aids, worksheets effectively teach social skills to your child.
Social skills worksheets offer excellent resources to help your child with autism to develop and hone their ability to communicate and relate with others. This way, they can build confidence and become more socially active.
From pre-school and primary school children to teenagers, social skills worksheets can benefit the social development of kids across different age groups.
Moving forward, we’ll emphasize the wide variety of worksheets effective for teaching social norms and behaviors to children with autism.
Social Skills Worksheets for People with Autism
Various types of worksheets can assist you in inculcating interactive skills and social awareness in your child. These materials are uniquely designed to address specific areas of social well-being in autistic individuals.
The following are the different types of social skills worksheets for people with autism.
Worksheets for Emotional Health
Recognizing who they are and managing how they feel is an essential aspect of social and emotional development in kids. However, children on the autism spectrum often find developing their emotional awareness challenging. This is where emotional health worksheets come in handy, as it helps in teaching your child how to work out theirs and others’ feelings.
This worksheet is created to help your child recognize others’ feelings through their body language. The emotional health material teaches various facial expressions, body gestures, and the tone of voice that should accompany them.
Body and Voice Language Worksheet
This emotional health worksheet explains how the tone and volume of one’s voice convey different emotions. Also, it will teach your child to express their feelings with their body rather than voice.
Being able to perceive and understand how others feel is fundamental to developing empathy. The empathy skill builder uses demonstrative pictures to teach children with autism to identify a person’s emotions through their facial expressions and body language.
Worksheets for Object Identification
These worksheets help your child learn to recognize common objects, enhance their visual memory skills, and improve their reasoning and pre-reading abilities.
This object identification worksheet will teach your child to apply their reasoning skills when discerning an object’s position. While on the sheet, as your child decides where an object rightfully belongs, they also learn to recognize the words written beneath each image.
Identifying Common Objects Cards
These cards will assist your child in identifying everyday objects while working on their word pronunciation.
Circle & Identify Object Worksheet
This object identification worksheet is designed to enhance your child’s observation skills. To complete their task on this worksheet, your kid will be required to spot and circle the picture corresponding to each object.
Worksheets for Anger Management
People on the autism spectrum should be taught effective ways to manage strong emotions like anger. With anger management worksheets, your child can learn how to deal with their anger in different social situations.
Below are the different worksheets for controlling anger in people with autism.
- Anger triggers worksheets
- Anger signs worksheets
- Anger expression worksheets
- Problem-solving worksheets
Your child can learn to control their anger using the healthy anger management techniques depicted in this 12-card set.
Autism Anger Management Problem Solving Wheels
These worksheets – in the form of a wheel – will give your child insights into how to react when angry. For example, the material teaches kids to ‘wait and cool off’, ‘go to another activity,’ or ‘talk it out’ when upset.
These sheets will enable your child to identify and interpret common anger signs such as clenching jaws, flushed skin, and loud voice tones.
Worksheets for Communication
As already noted in this article, social communication can be a challenge for people on the autism spectrum. Fortunately, these worksheets will help your child with autism develop excellent communication skills.
Social Communication for Autism
This set of 29 communication worksheets will teach kids with autism how to strike good conversations and be empathetic towards other people.
Clothes and Dressing Communication Cards
Your child will find this visual communication tool helpful as they learn how to make clothing-related decisions and requests.
Communication Worksheets for Children with Autism
These sheets are specifically designed to assist children with autism build effective communicative skills.
Asides from employing these worksheets, there are other ways to help your loved one improve their social skills. For example, therapy is a proven way to assist individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
How Golden Care ABA Can Help Those With Social Skills Need
At Golden Care therapy, we provide ABA therapy to children with autism spectrum disorder and help them lead happy, independent, and fulfilling lives.
ABA, which stands for applied behavior analysis, is a procedure of therapy that teaches functional behaviors and new skills to individuals on the autism spectrum. And this treatment will improve your child’s social life in the following ways:
- It assists your child in harnessing their communication and conversational skills.
- ABA therapy enhances your child with autism’s social awareness, focus, and memory.
- It also helps your loved one understand facial expressions and body language.
- Your child will learn to manage their emotions better with ABA therapy.
If you are ready to work with the best ABA therapy provider in New York, New Jersey or Indiana, give us a call at (732) 402-0297. Our dedicated team is ready to help and we will treat you like family.
