Whole Body Listening

I will *finally* be giving a presentation this week at my district's monthly SLP meetings. It will be mostly focused on the social skills class I took over the summer. I also plan on bringing in a few things that I have made to use with my groups. 

I don't have many students on my caseload with goals for social skills. The majority of them are language and a few articulation. However, I have one fourth grader that has been learning social skills for several years now. It's one of those cases where you can talk about the skills and the student will always answer the questions correctly. The problem is actually carrying that knowledge over into actions. Listening is a particularly tough issue at the moment. I found the Whole Body Listening poster on pinterest and made one of my own. I used it to introduce the topic to the group with examples of listening styles. 

I made a second poster that is identical to the first. I cut up the poster into manipulative pieces. The students have to match up the pieces to recreate the poster from memory. They did really well with this activity as you can see. 

Now, the guy on my poster is named Listening Larry. I found this little super hero stuffed animal at goodwill. He's supposed to be for some sort of telecommunications company that happens to start with an "L". I can't remember the name off the top of my head. He's one of those finds that you just immediately snatch up with an obvious purpose in mind. Listening Larry becomes a super hero when he sees other kids making listening mistakes. He swoops in to save the day for the teacher and class. (P.S. My kids have a HUGE thing for super heroes even in the 4th grade...lol.) If the kids don't feel comfortable pointing out mistakes, they can use Larry to talk about them. 

I've also created a 5 point scale poster for this group. It's another manipulative poster that uses velcro to attach the feeling statements for each face.