Social skills activities for elementary

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!

Social Skills of Primary School Students - Child Development

In the early grades, the child's social circle changes. Some find best friends for themselves, many strive for this. Some children find it easy to find company, others find it difficult. How can you help your child learn to get along with peers? Let's take a look at some suggestions for this.

1. Be alert to situations where your child is having difficulty with peers

If you tell your child each time what he should do in a given situation, you will let him know that he is not able to cope with such situations on their own. Your instructions won't teach him anything. Instead, help your child understand their feelings and identify the cause of the problem.

2. Do not take sides in conflicts between the child and peers

Listen to the child's point of view and accept his feelings, but do not blame the other child for everything. If you suspect that your child is not completely honest with you, invite him to look at the situation from the opposite side. However, don't blame your child either. For example, you could say to your child, “I wonder why Ann said such hurtful words. Maybe she was offended by you and Katya for not inviting her to play with you?

3. Teach your child to voice their needs without being in conflict with others

This can be tricky and will likely require a lot of your time and patience. For example, if your little daughter is yelling at her friend, “Don't give orders!”, you might say, “You seem to be very angry with Ira. Tell her what you want rather than what you think of her.”

4. Teach your child to stand for yourself

Every child should learn this skill. For some, this will require you to sort out some situations by roles: “It seems to me that you wanted to tell Sasha that you like to fight him, but you need to discuss the rules. For example, you can agree that the word "stop" means the end of the fight. It's probably hard to tell a friend. Let's rehearse these words, and it will be easier for you to say them to Sasha.

5. Do not deny the child's point of view about other people

Instead, accept the child's feelings and help him express them. For example, instead of the phrase: “I don’t think Ksenia wanted to offend you. You should not refuse to go to her birthday, "you can say:" It seems to me that what Xenia said in the yard offended you. You think she did it on purpose and that's why you don't want to go to her birthday party."

Your emotional support will help your child deal with negative feelings and make informed decisions as a result.

6. Acknowledge and respond to the child's feelings rather than being dismissive

Parents sometimes find it so difficult to see their child experiencing negative emotions that they become angry at the person who caused them. At the same time, they can say: “He is not your friend. Don't hang out with him and find yourself some new friends." But such advice will not help the child. They deny the child's feelings, and as a result, he continues to suffer.

First of all, get your own feelings about the situation under control. Empathize with your child and help him process his feelings. The child may become even more sad for a while, but this is how he expresses his feelings, and does not suppress them. When he feels better, he will try to find the best way out of the situation.

7. In primary school, children often suffer from the fact that someone tries to command them

All children want everything to happen the way they want. But at the same time they want other children to play with them. The ability to negotiate is extremely important at this age. To teach this to your child, ask him questions, for example: “What is more important to you: that you can play the way you want, or that Katya play with you?”

When another child tries to be bossy, yours may need prompting on how to communicate politely. Teach your child phrases like: “I want to play with you. But we've been playing with dolls all morning, and I'm already tired. Let's come up with something that will be interesting for both of us."

8. Teach your child to find different solutions to problems

Often, when children experience different emotions, they know what actions to take, for example: “I am no longer angry with Serezha, and I want to play with him. I'll go and invite him to play." But, if the child does not know what to do, help him. Sometimes a child just doesn't know how to say "no" without ruining a friendship with someone. And you can help him with this.

9. If the child is having difficulty, think about how you can help him

Some children have difficulty with social skills, such as being unable to join a new company. Some children do not know how to listen to the interlocutor and invade the personal space of other children. Watch your child when he plays with peers and pay attention to what goes wrong. Later, without making the child feel guilty or ashamed, act out this scene with plush toys. At the same time, ask the child what the characters should say or do. Inject some fun into this activity to lighten the mood.

Reading books on social skills can also be helpful, so that the child understands that you want to support him, not correct his behavior.

If you don't know how to help your child, read parenting books about social skills. This will help you understand what your child needs to learn and provide targeted support.

10. Be attentive to the words of other children and their parents. When need be ready intervene

Emotional reactions to certain situations can become habitual in a child. An example of this is the use of force: parents often justify such behavior of young children, but when the children get older, there is nothing they can do about it. When children (especially at the age of two) show aggression, this indicates that they cannot cope with their feelings (most often fear) that affect their behavior. When a child resorts to the use of force in primary school, this is a signal to parents that he needs help.

If the parents of another child say that your son has hit him, you should be wary. Don't blame your child, but help him put himself in his peer's shoes and think about how he felt. Invite your child to apologize. Analyze the situation with him and think about how to avoid this next time. Explain to the child that, whether provoked or not, the use of physical force is unacceptable.

Then take a close look at your child's life. Maybe he is too sensitive, suppresses his feelings and needs your help? Maybe he becomes a witness to how violence is used against other people in the family, on TV, etc.? Do you yourself use physical force to discipline the child (this also applies to cases when you put him in a corner or close him in his room). The answers to these questions will help you find the root of the problem.

Social-emotional skills in school. Part 1.

Within the framework of the project “University Environment for Teachers” of the Moscow Department of Education, a program of several lectures was presented at the HSE Institute of Education, the participants of which were also members of the Educational Spaces Design Studio. This article will focus on lecture “Forms of work in the classroom that contribute to the development of social and emotional skills of students” , author — Tatyana Kanonir , Associate Professor, PhD, co-director of the master's program “Measurements in Psychology and Education”.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the importance of developing social-emotional skills. The educational standards of basic and primary schools in Russia require the formation of students, along with subject educational results, meta-subject and personal educational results. It is under personal educational results that social-emotional skills are hidden.

Social Emotional Skills (SES) are skills that enable people to recognize and manage their emotions, successfully manage conflicts, understand and empathize with others, establish and maintain positive relationships, follow ethics, contribute constructively to their reference communities, set and achieve goals.

Different terms are used to refer to these “non-cognitive” skills: Soft Skills, 21st century skills, emotional intelligence... All of these concepts differ from each other in scope and context of use, but have similar features: conceptual independence on cognition, total value for social adaptation, relative stability over time, potential change as a result of exposure , situational manifestation.

In this article we will focus on 2 social-emotional skills

Achieving goals : working towards achieving short- and long-term goals, including in changing conditions:
- stability (ability to maintain stable work for a significant time),
- self-control (the ability to control one's state in the process of performing a task),
- striving for a goal (awareness of the need to achieve the goal - independent or set by the teacher).

Collaboration with others

sociability (ability to establish and maintain social contacts),

respect (tact and respect for peers and adults, including those from other cultures),

caring (disinterested assistance to the interaction partner).

Exercises to help teachers develop these social-emotional skills in students

1. Formation of the skill of achieving goals

Exercise : mutual assistance in achieving individual goals (conducted in small groups)

The teacher begins the lesson by telling the children about the difficulties people often face in achieving their own goals, and suggests the most general strategies for overcoming these obstacles, writing the main points on the board. For example, it could be a list like this:

frustration (depending on the audience, a more understandable term may be used, such as depression) that the goal is too difficult. Possible strategies: relaxation, distraction, break from work.

boredom . Possible strategies: set a shorter-term goal, give yourself a reward (such as a break or ice cream). too lazy to do the task. Possible strategies are: assign yourself a reward, think about how you will feel when you complete the task, or that if you do not study, you will let the whole group down.

anxiety due to fear of failure . Possible strategies: remember situations in which everything worked out, relaxation techniques.

Then the teacher formulates in writing an individual educational (or near-academic) goal for each of the children (it is better to do this work in advance) and divides them into groups.

Children sit in a circle, each voices their goal and names possible obstacles to achieving it. The rest of the group suggests possible solutions based on the information on the board or their own experience, and also try to suggest one action that they personally could help another child (for example, “I can call you on Friday and remind you that in you have to do the weekend…”, “I can call and find out how you are doing…”, “I can explain to you the material that you don’t understand…”, etc.).

In the following week, students discuss in groups their progress towards their goals, how they felt when their classmates helped them, what kind of help was most helpful.

Expected results : children learn to anticipate barriers to achieving a goal and think in advance about possible options for overcoming them, children learn to help others achieve their goals, ask for help and accept it.

2. Learning how to work with others

Exercise : learning together

projects - for example, to study material about some country, continent, scientist, physical phenomenon, etc.,
each student is instructed to work through a certain part of the material, and then tell all the other members of the group about their findings,

then the group should prepare a joint presentation for the rest of the class,

at the end of the work it is necessary to discuss - what has been done and what has not been done? What turned out to be difficult in doing joint work, what can be done differently next time (when discussing, it is important not to indicate value judgments).

This exercise can have many variations, for example, “brain rings”, “debates” of representatives of different historical eras, etc.

According to the head of the Educational Spaces Design Studio Rai Ivanovskaya, the task of forming and developing SES among students can definitely be solved with the help of designing the school space:
forgot about the goals set (by the teacher or by themselves) - you can make a special stand in the class, on which they could write their goals, indicate the planned deadlines for achievement, indicate the expected obstacles and how they eventually coped with them. That is, this information is constantly “in sight” (the guys will not forget), and is also a demonstration of their success. In the event that someone does not cope with the task on their own, this is also visible and the teacher can “hint” to the students that their help and support is required (and this is already a manifestation of caring - that is, the skill of working together).

The stand itself must be visually attractive in design (with motivating phrases, for example), made of modern materials (marker film, cork, etc.) - so that children would be “pleasant” and interested in interacting with it.

Educational space design studio: we turn boring school interiors into bright and beautiful ones! View our work in the PORTFOLIO section.

By the way
Many currently existing SES assessment tools have disadvantages: they are based on purely local experience, data on the psychometric quality of methods are not published, there are practically no references to international experience, experience is often designed for individual assessment and is not scaled, and the result of assessment depends on the skills of the teacher and his attitude towards a particular student. However, if we do not have SES assessment tools, then we cannot draw conclusions about their development, can we?

The HSE Education Quality Monitoring Center, together with the Sberbank Charitable Foundation “Investment in the Future”, conducted a large-scale study of social and emotional skills in primary and secondary schools, based on an international research framework, associated with the Federal State Educational Standards for Primary and Basic Education, which resulted in developed monitoring evaluation tools.
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