Wellbeing

Hi St Mary’s,

This week I have shadowed Steph Silvagni, our resident Speech Pathologist introducing our social thinking program called Social Detectives. This will be delivered with classroom teachers present for about 11 weeks and then used in an ongoing fashion though classroom teachers and small groups with me and Steph. It has been great to get this underway and to start to introduce some of the ideas, concepts and language.

As an introduction to this program I have included information from the website. As the term progresses I will share and reflect on what we have been learning.

It would be great if you could follow up what we are doing by checking in with your kids about what they have learnt during the program and hopefully we can start to use the same language. This really helps support what we are trying to achieve at school.

Social thinking is our meaning maker

‘Social thinking is the process by which we interpret the thoughts, beliefs, intentions, emotions, knowledge, and actions of another person along with the context of the situation to understand that person’s experience. If we are engaging or sharing space with another person, we use this information to determine how to respond to affect the thoughts that person has about us to achieve our social goals (such as being friendly to maintain a friendship, acting generous to impress a date, and seeming unfriendly to deflect attention when walking alone late at night, etc.). Social thinking is our meaning maker—it allows us to interpret the deeper meaning behind what others do in the world, and (if the situation calls for it) prompts us with how to respond. A person’s social thinking strength has a considerable effect on their relationships and success in school and at work. It affects the person’s social skills, perspective taking, self-awareness, self-regulation, critical thinking, social problem solving, play skills, reading comprehension, written expression, ability to learn and work in a group, organizational skills, etc.’

https://www.socialthinking.com/social-thinking-methodology

I hope everyone has had a good week and please get in touch if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Mark O’Sullivan