Group activities social skills

20 Evidence-Based Social Skills Activities and Games for Kids

Oct 14 2020

Positive Action Staff

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SEL Articles

Activities and games for socialization are a great way for your child to learn how to behave around their peers, no matter if he is a toddler, preschooler or if he just started kindergarten. Games can teach skills like taking turns, managing emotions, and reading body language.

Use these evidence-based social skills activities to help your child build their social behaviors and learn how their actions affect others. With these games, they can become more independent and maintain healthy relationships throughout their lives.

1. Staring Contest

Many children have trouble maintaining eye contact in conversation. A staring contest can help kids make and keep eye contact in a way that allows them to focus on that task, rather than trying to communicate simultaneously.

If your child still feels uncomfortable, you can start smaller. Place a sticker on your forehead for them to look at and then build toward having a conversation.

2. Roll the Ball

It’s never too early to start building social skills, and a game of roll the ball suits children as young as toddlers. Kids take turns rolling a ball back and forth between them, laying the foundation for other social skills.

Kids learn to carry this skill into taking turns in conversation or when doing joint activities. They also learn self-control by aiming the ball toward their friend and rolling it hard enough to reach them yet with limited force.

3. Virtual Playtime

Sometimes, your child can’t have play dates in person, but they can still spend time together over video chat and other online spaces. Video chats help kids make eye contact by looking at their friend on the screen.

Learning to adapt to new situations becomes a valuable trait, whether with social distancing or in their future workplace. Coming up with new ways to spend time together increases problem-solving abilities, which adds to a set of vital social skills.

4. Emotion Charades

Emotion charades involves writing different emotions on strips of paper. Your child picks one out of a hat or bucket. Then, they must try to act out that emotion.

Emotion charades can help children learn to recognize emotions using facial and body cues. You can even adapt social skills activities like this to create a game similar to Pictionary, where children draw the emotion.

By depicting and acting out emotional expressions and reactions in social skills activities, children learn emotion management, which plays an important role in creating positive relationships and communicating feelings.

5. Expression Mimicking Games

When you play this game with your child, you're teaching social skills with expressions. Mimicking your expressions allows your child to understand what certain expressions mean and recognize them when others make them in real conversations.

When kids with social challenges learn to read facial expressions, they become more comfortable in situations involving them.

6. Topic Game

You can play several variations of the topic game, but the most common one involves choosing a topic and naming things that fit into that category using each letter of the alphabet. For example, if you choose animals as the topic, you might come up with:

A: Aardvark
B: Baboon
C: Chicken

The topic game teaches kids to stick to one subject and follow directions until they complete the activity. It also helps them make connections and get creative with letters that have fewer options.

7. Step Into Conversation

Step Into Conversation is a card game made for children with autism. The game presents structured social skills activities, like starting a conversation and talking about specific subjects based on cards.

The game helps kids learn how to talk to others appropriately and carry a conversation with perspective and empathy. It teaches good manners and self-control by showing them how to politely enter a conversation, when to talk, and when to listen.

By using socialization games like this one, you give structure to conversations to develop the social skills necessary to handle different situations in their daily life.

8. Improvisational Stories

Many children tell stories even outside of intentional social skills activities. With improvisational stories, you add another challenge that requires them to collaborate and create a narrative without thinking about it beforehand.

For this activity, place cards with pictures or words face down. The child picks three of these cards, and they must include these objects or topics in the story they tell. The game ends when all the cards are gone, or the kids reach the end of their story.

You can use this activity as a multiplayer game where children take turns adding to the story and building on each other’s ideas, or one child can tell you their own story.

9. Name Game

With this simple game, kids roll or toss a ball to someone after they call out their name. Social skills activities like this one work well for helping even toddlers learn their peers’ names. It shows that they are attentive to others, and it’s a step toward getting to know other people.

10. Simon Says

Simon Says builds social skills for kids' self-control, listening, and impulse control as they copy their peers' movements and follow instructions. It also helps keep the attention on the game and rewards good behavior for those who follow the rules throughout the game.

11. Rhythm Games

You can incorporate rhythm games as a social skills activity both at home and in the classroom. These music-making games let your child be creative while following directions and recognizing patterns.

A 2010 study by Kirschner and Tomasello shows that joint music-making helps social behavior. In a game where children must “wake the frogs” with music, the researchers found that kids who followed the rules by making music were more likely to help others who tried waking the frogs with non-musical means.

12. Playing with Characters

These social skills activities involve tapping into your child’s natural tendency to play. Using stuffed animals or dolls, you can interact with your child through the toys.

Having conversations through toys teaches kids to recognize behaviors and communicate their feelings. They practice their social skills through the toys in an imaginary, low-risk environment, without worrying about the toys’ hurt feelings.

13. Play Pretend

Kids will typically create a scenario in which they pretend to be someone or something else. For example, they might play house and take on the roles of parents, become a doctor, veterinarian, teacher, or cashier. Each of these situations allows them to explore different social skills activities.

As they pretend to parent another child, for instance, they must learn to recognize and respond to emotions, deescalate situations, and adapt to new situations.

14. Token Stack

You can adapt token stack from board games like checkers to create social skills activities that teach children how to have a considerate conversation. Every time the child speaks and responds appropriately, they add another token to their stack.

They face the challenge of trying to stack their tokens as high as possible while taking turns speaking. This activity makes them focus on having a calm conversation and giving thoughtful responses to questions and statements.

15. Decision-Making Games

Social skills activities like decision-making games come in many forms. By using strategy games or activities as simple as sorting and matching, your child learns persistence, thoughtfulness, and cooperation with others.

These games help kids with indecision, as they ask the child to make a choice, even if it’s not right the first time. It demonstrates low-risk consequences and encourages them to try again if they make a mistake.

16. Building Game

When children work together to build something, like a tower using blocks, they must communicate, take turns, and understand each other to bring their creation to life.

Kids will work together to come up with a method to build their item. When they apply it, they learn to try again if the creation falls and celebrate each other’s unique abilities when they finish the project successfully.

17. Community Gardening

Community gardening works differently than other social skills activities in that it teaches children to nurture a living thing.

Gardening with others increases social competence by having your child take care of something and learn responsibility, as they cannot neglect their plants. This activity also gets kids outdoor and can help calm them.

18. Team Sports

Children can participate in team sports through their school, on a recreational team, or even play with friends in their backyard. Team sports show kids how to work together toward a common goal and keep their focus on the game.

They also learn to recognize emotions, like when someone gets hurt or scores a goal, and react appropriately when they win or lose.

19. Productive Debate

A productive debate works well for older kids to learn how to manage emotions and work on positive expression, even in challenging situations. They learn how to have difficult conversations calmly, without turning them into an argument or trying to insult the other person.

People who can debate and listen to their opponent develop more of the skills needed to become leaders in the classroom and workplace.

20. Scavenger Hunts

During scavenger hunts, children work together to find objects or get a prize at the end of the activity. By working toward their goal, they learn teamwork, organization, and positive decision-making. They can choose to split up, move as a group, and collaborate to reach the end of the game.

They also get rewarded for cooperating. These activities help them with creative problem-solving abilities by making up clues for other players to solve.

What’s Next?

Using evidence-based social skills activities and games helps your child build social skills while doing something they enjoy. You can adapt any of these activities to something that engages your child and allows them to get creative with their socialization.

However, activities and games can only go so far. The Positive Action social skills curriculum is designed to work in tandem with activities like these and more to help your child identify their self-concept and shift this introspection to their social interactions. We feel social skills start within.

Explore our sample lessons for even more ways to encourage your child’s social-emotional learning, or contact us to find out how our program can improve your child’s social skills and have fun doing it today!

Try These 5 Great Social Skills Activities for Students & Groups

Working as a school psychologist in the public school system for many years, I sometimes heard school counselors asking for advice about which social skills activities they should do with their students

Children in the group often had difficulty with skills such as:

listening
waiting their turn in conversation
staying on topic
sharing materials
understanding another person’s feelings
getting along with others
resolving conflict
appropriately expressing their own feelings

This article gives five suggestions for social skills activities for students and groups.

You may think these activities are more appropriate for elementary-age students but I think they can really be adapted for younger and older groups.

Activities can also be modified for a one-on-one situation such as parent/child or counselor/student.

What the research says about social skills instruction: Phillip C. Kendall, Professor of Psychology, reported the positive effects of using modeling and role playing, and teaching self-evaluation when teaching social skills.
Further research, such as Social Skills Training for Teaching Replacement Behaviors: Remediating Acquisition Deficits in At-Risk Students, confirms the benefits of intense social skills instruction.

Interactive Social Skills Books for Kids

5

Great Social Skills Activities for Students

1. Use engaging conversation, demonstration, role-play and/or visuals to teach students what social skills are and why we need to use them.

See an example of social skills below:

When first introducing kids to a social skills group it is a good idea to have them understand what social skills are and why they are important.

As a starting activity, write down different social skills (such as the ones from the list above) on individual slips of paper and put them in a bowl, hat, etc.

Have your students sit in a circle and pass around the slips of paper, taking turns pulling them out of the bowl one at a time.

When the student pulls the slip of paper from the bowl, ask them to say what the social skill means, have them give an example, and/or ask them to tell the rest of the group why that skill is important.

Give as much guidance and support as your students need to answer the questions. You may want to go first, to show the students how to do this activity.

Here is an example:

If a student picked “sharing materials” she could say “That means to let someone use something that you are using.

For example, if I am coloring with crayons I can let my friend borrow my crayons and color with me. Sharing is important because it shows others that you care about how they feel. Part of being a good friend is sharing.”

You could even have students act out the skills. So in this example, you can have one of your students pick materials to share with the other members of the group.

You can also let students create their own drawings of the skill you are talking about. To give you an idea of what I mean, below is a drawing of sharing:

Depending on the students’ skill and age level, frustration tolerance, and ability to sustain attention, you can do all of the suggestions I mentioned in this activity or just one.

You can break this into several lessons by only doing a few social skills at a time.

You also might want to add some skills that are not on the list such as showing empathy, staying on topic in conversation, and using manners.

Recommended Article: 15 Behavior Strategies for Children on the Autism Spectrum

2.

Use games and fun activities to practice sharing, turn-taking, listening, following directions, encouraging others, and being polite.

In the video below, the therapist uses bubbles as the prop. Other objects can be used to tailor this activity to students of different ages.

Imagine implementing this same lesson but using activities such as shooting a basketball in a net, playing with a remote control car, doing an activity on the computer, etc.

Recommended Article: 8 Fun Activities to Practice Social Skills with Your Child

3. Use conversation starters to create a dialogue between students or between counselor and student.

Then the youth is supposed to ask another person a question related to the topic they pick, and the other person is to ask a related question back.

This activity allows students to practice listening, taking turns in conversation, staying on topic, and expressing interest in another person’s thoughts, ideas, and/or life. See examples in the video below.

The counselor in the video below encourages the students to pick a topic from a slip of paper in a cup (e.g., friendship, fears, favorite activities, etc..)

4. Teach what is means to be a friend.

This next video gives you great ideas for how to talk to children about what it means to be a friend.

After you show the video, have your students:

tell you what they learned about being a friend
draw a picture that shows someone being a friend to another person
and/or practice one of the skills in the video

For example, this video mentions being a good listener and sharing as two of the things good friends do, so as part of the lesson have your students practice listening to each other and/or sharing items.

Talk to your students about what it means to be an active listener (e.g., looking in the direction of the person who is talking, waiting your turn to speak, responding to what the person said, trying to understand how the other person might be feeling, etc.).

The “What it means to be a friend” lesson could be a great segue into the lessons above which hone in on sharing skills and conversation skills.

Related Article: How to End Bullying Part 1: 19 Tips for Parents and Teachers

5. Practice complimenting each other.

Speaking of being a good friend, complimenting others (a great friendship skill) is another nice activity to do with your group.

Set the expectations from the beginning that only kind words and respect for each other is allowed in the group.

For this activity, you could go around in a circle and have each student say something nice about someone else in the group.

To make sure everyone gets a turn to be complimented, put people’s names on slips of paper in the bowl and have them pass it around taking turns pulling out names.

This activity will get easier as the students get to know each other better.

If the students just met and are not sure what to say about each other, allow them to say something nice about a family member or friend outside of the group.

As the group gets to know each other, the compliments should be about the group members.

Side Note: To teach self-evaluation, discuss how you and your student(s)/client(s) did during each activity. Give specific feedback about what went well and discuss areas that need improvement.

Let your clients share their own thoughts and perceptions about how they did during the activity. Encourage your clients to think about their own behavior when they are involved in similar real-life scenarios.

You may be interested in Model Me Kids.

Model Me Kids produces dozens of videos to teach/model social skills that can help children develop better relationships.

Video modeling is a research-based practice. You can view more of the Model Me Kids Video Program here. Below is a sample video.

Recommended: Become a Certified Self-Esteem Coach for Children

Education and Behavior – Keeping Us on the Same Page for Kids!

general characteristics, scopes, main models

Group work traditionally widely used in social work and most often used in the field of children and adolescents, as well as people of all ages with similar social and individual problems in a similar social situations. Intense group forms activities are used to work with juvenile offenders teenagers from disadvantaged families, with the elderly and people with disabilities and mental disabilities. Usually group work is small group of people with similar goals, interests or concerns on the initiative or with the participation of social employee meets regularly and involved in joint activities to achieve common goals. Unlike, say, from psychotherapeutic groups of goals for joint activities in in this case are not necessarily related with the solution of emotional and intrapersonal conflicts and problems. It could be an exchange of information joint social action, development practical, social and interpersonal skills, restructuring of asocial behavior. The variety of groups can be classified according to their target orientation.

1. Leisure groups: often exist without external guidance; if such a group operates under the auspices any municipal center then its employees can offer organizer to help gather interested people and involve them into purposeful activity (for example, on the organization of sports team or creative or entertainment event). Such groups can additionally develop certain skills. Social agencies help organize and structure these groups.

2. Training groups: groups in which learning takes place in one way or another. activity skills, often routine didactic methods, for example, parent groups, management groups at home, etc., various discussion groups.

3. Self-help groups: These are groups bringing together people with similar problems (within the framework of rehabilitation programs, using group forms of work, such as "Anonymous alcoholics" or "Synanon"), who come together for a moral, emotional and informational support; although these groups are fundamentally refuse the services of professionals, social worker may be initiator of such groups.

4. Socialization groups: many consider them as the main center of the group social work, as the goals of these groups - behavioral changes and development of social skills. Social worker, acting in similar groups as an agent of socialization, actively teaches, sets models of social behavior, helps to speed up learning new social roles and develop role competence, organizes discussions, provides favorable environment and thus creates opportunities to change role behavior and interactions. Such groups are organized usually in the correctional system institutions, hospitals, children's institutions, various clubs, etc. for the purpose of adaptation and readaptation certain categories of people to those or other situational conditions. Groups socialization may have wider aims to promote inclusion in society and general development.

5. Psycho-correctional groups: are being created for clients who want to solve their emotional problems or can't take part in the activities of ordinary groups. Unlike from psychotherapy groups here do not treat neuroses, reactive states and other clinically significant psychopathological states. Goals such groups can be developed self-awareness and self-acceptance, behavioral modification, etc. Usually such groups exist within organizations working in the field mental health, medical social work, etc.

Separately note the group work with youth. Traditionally, she was remains one of the main areas group social work and given a significant place in the group practice, but, however, as noted some authors [275, 282], mostly in the leisure sector. The goals of various youth social work programs define the following directions activities [233, p. 274]:

1) recreational activities and informal training designed for the development of such spiritual and ethical values, like love for home, family, friends, interest in the community and country, shaping civil responsibility;

2) development of social skills and experience interpersonal relationships through participation in the work of friendship clubs, interest groups, through the expansion of extra-familial and extracurricular life experience, playing sports, etc.;

3) services for young people with special needs (difficulties in learning at school, conflicts with the police, social isolation) to promote adaptation family, peers, social communities;

4) development of local government and self-government through the creation special training programs for citizens and councils of public representatives.

Like this way, group work at its most various types and organizational forms makes up a huge layer worker activities in the United States. Obviously, such a breadth of professional interests and diversity of directions activities create significant difficulties in creating definitions group social work.

B contemporary English literature in social work, you can find a large number of group work definitions. We Here are just a few of the most frequently cited. So the group social work can be considered like:

- "method social work that helps individuals to improve their social functioning through purposeful organization of group experience and gives opportunity to be more efficient deal with individual, group or community problems” [322, p. 118];

- "targeted activities in the context of small groups, focused on satisfaction socio-emotional needs and solving group problems. This activity can be directed to an individual as a member of a group or per group in general” [440, c . 12];

- "work with a small group aimed at providing helping group members to use of joint activities to address existing problems in psychosocial functioning, prevention of possible problems, development of group and organizational structure, liquidation obstacles to normal life and social environment” [362, p. four].

existing differences in definitions in there are two central for the American social tradition work with the group of the moment. First, these definitions represent the main direction of social work improvement and development of the ability to social functioning. In this paradigm starting point of social work is up-to-date or potential problem - macro or microsocial, personal or interpersonal - in its specific presentation to the individual. Such pragmatic orientation problems" is very typical for American models of social work, which do not update, at least measure at the level of theoretical constructions, general developmental and educational tasks. But apparently not it should be assumed that the solution to the problem in the social functioning of the individual at the same time, it comes down to providing a utilitarian help. The problem in this sense is not just a lack of something normal life, but real contradiction between needs of individual development and internal and external capabilities of the individual or community of people. Removing this contradiction actualizes development potential personality and thus correlates with the goals of education in a broad sense as "the systematic creation of conditions for relatively focused human development in the process of socialization” [81, p. 153]. By the way, the European model more social work associated with the traditions of socio-pedagogical thoughts, so the goals of the social education in it are presented in more explicit form. In particular, T. Yarkina cites one of the European definitions of group social work as "a form and method that is used for the purpose helping people through transfer of group experience for development his physical and spiritual strength, the formation social behavior” [201]. it the definition directly explicates, in our view, educational goals of social work, although somewhat obscures specificity social work with group.

Second central point of social work with a group, clearly visible in the above definitions, − it is an expedient organization of the group experience, enabling group members look for effective solutions to the overall problems and thus develop modify and enrich the individual participants' experience. In that group work is intended to gain constructive life goals and promote change in assessment reality, in the structure of self-consciousness, communication and social skills group members through the organization positive group experience and interactions. It's kind of a tool promoting self-determination of the individual, way to develop personal autonomy, social responsibility and dignity [233, p. 9eight].

These two aspects are key and determining the overall goals of social group work. Usually as they are called [410, c. 78]:

1) helping the group achieve jointly certain goals;

2) promoting the desired change in the structure of individual experience, in understanding personal, family, professional issues and problems mutual accommodation;

3) helping the group to better use of joint activities for self-development and mutual enrichment of its members.

If now turn to the theoretical concepts of group social work, which should ideally translate general goals of working with a group on language specific tasks and operational principles of social employee, we have to admit that current state of theory in the USA in the field of group social work eclectic, inconsistency, fragmentation concepts, inconsistency of general methodological foundations and principles. Most Concepts rebroadcast without adequate rethinking is arbitrary enough selected set of concepts, phenomena and mechanisms of group and social speakers borrowed from various areas of scientific knowledge (social psychology, sociology, systems theory and management, etc. ) and adapt it in sets of methodical recommendations, advice and functional duties for a social worker. R. Roberts and H. Northern published a collective scientific work [435], in which their positions presented the most authoritative representatives of various concepts social work with the group. Target this edition was to carry out a theoretical systematization and identify key differences between different approaches, like how it works in the theory of individual social work. But as noted Roberts and Northern, this is an enterprise turned out to be unsuccessful. One side, theoretically, the authors say about such different things that there is no even a point of contention. On the other hand, at the level of a meaningful description group work is reproduced in different terms virtually identical set of practical recommendations. AT afterword, trying nevertheless to highlight main points of contention, editors even used procedures content analysis. But these measures also make only a superficial analysis of type of "more or less attention", and "mention or not mention". The editors concluded that presented approaches are rather than social work theories, and theories for social group work.

Therefore we, referring to the analysis of meaningful aspects of organizing interaction in the process of group social work, found it expedient to go not from theoretical postulates and designs of individual authors, and from actually existing in practice models of organizing group work. As a basis, we took the idea of American researchers K. Paypell and B. Rotman. They identified three models for working with group, in varying degrees of severity, presented in the practice of social work.

3.1.1. Concept of group work | Electronic library

Social work / Content and methodology of psychosocial work / 3.1.1. The concept of group work

The term "group work" is used in relation to activities with groups . Group work requires certain professional knowledge and qualifications. Social group work is understood as a special form of individual work. In this regard, we note the general, which is typical for social work at this level:

· problem-based approaches, where the specificity of clients' problems brings to life certain group work techniques;

· orientation of group work to work with the case through the establishment of subject-subject relations with the group, where the social worker is assigned the role of mediator and facilitator;

· focus on the techniques and methods of group work adopted in related disciplinary areas focused on working with pathologies;

· appropriation and rethinking in theoretical and practical approaches of the conceptual apparatus, methods and principles from the practice of work of psychotherapists and practical psychologists;

· creation of individual approaches, activity principles and values in dealing with various cases.

The methodology and technology of social work with a group is based on psychosocial theories that allow analyzing interactive processes in interpersonal interaction. The main theoretical model of group work was substantiated by K. Papell and B. Rotman. It is based on theoretical approaches from ego psychology, cognitive and social learning theory, role theories and communication theory.

Ego psychology offers concepts that explain the internal self-organization of the individual and his relationship with the outside world. These concepts enable the social worker to understand the client's behavior as an individual and as a member of a group, to reflect on how a person's individual adaptation to reality and to other members of the community takes place, how he meets external pressure, how internal anxiety is formed.

When studying personality in ego psychology, special attention is paid to the issues of development and adaptation, autonomy, freedom and features of the functioning of the Self. Personality acts as an autonomous entity capable of regulating relationships with the environment, having its own system of defense mechanisms. Guided by these provisions of ego psychology, the social worker, in the process of group work, seeks to update the skills of psychological defense of individuals, with the help of the group helps to develop them, to find various options for functioning in the process of group work, depending on various forms of aggression from the environment.

Based on the concepts of ego psychology, resistance in group work is seen not as a conflict, but as a dialogue between the individual and the environment. Hence, resistance and conflict are considered in the main model of group work as components of the development of the group, starting points for the differentiation of its members. Resistance is not perceived only as an intrapsychic process, as a reaction to a group situation, but can be reflected as a protective mechanism in a situation of development of group relations.

In terms of ego psychology, the main purpose of working with a group is to support the mental health of the individual, his identity, the development of self-realization.

Cognitive theories and theories of social learning enable social workers to interpret and analyze the motives of the behavior of individuals in intergroup interaction, determine the value orientations of clients, help them understand how they “feel each other”, how their knowledge about the world and about the situation. The experience of group interaction forms value orientations, positive expectations, competence and social interaction skills.

The therapeutic value of the main model of group work is determined by the ability of the group to help clients see the situation from a different perspective through the mechanisms of intergroup perception.

Relationship theory considers interpersonal relationships as a factor in the mutual influence of people on each other. In relation to group work, relationships are considered as certain stable connections that help the client understand his responsibilities in intergroup interaction, learn to coexist together with other members of the group in changing circumstances, to form the necessary skills for "building" psychological distance in the process of intergroup communication.

In accordance with the role theory of personality in the process of interpersonal interaction, an individual learns certain patterns of behavior corresponding to certain roles. This approach provides the social worker with knowledge about role expectations, role conflicts, role relationships that are formed in the process of group work. For a social worker, it is important to create conditions for the personal growth of the client, to improve his social functioning in society.

At the heart of the theory of communication are ideas about the dynamic exchange of information between subjects. Communication in the group process acts as a role-playing exchange of information, formalized in its manifestations, aimed at achieving a certain result. Therefore, in this aspect, communication acts as a specific tool for solving problems of group work. The theory of communication enables a social worker to observe specific obstacles in the process of group dynamics that complicate the social functioning of the subject, build programs to overcome them, and develop the skills of expressing individual feelings and ideas in group communication.