Social Skills - Social Skills Activity – Getting Someone's Attention
Social Skills / Getting Someone's Attention
Social Skills - Getting Someone's Attention
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Getting Someone's Attention
Getting someone's attention is not as simple as it seems. This activity helps students work on a variety of components of gaining attention, including spatial awareness, the non-verbal signs of engagement, knocking, and speaking.
Social Skills - Getting Someone's Attention
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Welcome to my Getting Someone's Attention activity. Check out this excerpt from the training video I did for the New York City Department of Education. Getting Someone's Attention is a seemingly simple social action, but it actually can be very complex. I realized that when I sent a student to get a teacher's attention, and I happened to see the student go to the classroom, and the teacher was about 20 feet away inside the classroom at the desk talking to another teacher. And where as you or I might've gone in and kind of waited till you get acknowledged, then say “oh hey I need to ask you something”, this student stopped in the doorway and just called out to the teacher and interrupted the conversation and it was inappropriate. So, for getting attention, we'll do a lot of role-playing first. We go over different variables.
What happens if the door is closed? What happens if the door's open? What if they're on the phone? What if it looks like they're looking down reading something? How do you get someone's attention? And whenever I role-play with students, I love to ham it up and be the worst possible at whatever we're doing. So, I'll like be knocking really loud on the door or whatever. I'll do crazy, silly stuff just to get them to laugh. And then students are tasked with delivering an envelope to a staff member, and inside the envelope is an evaluation form that the staff member can then fill out on how well the student did getting their attention. Thanks for reviewing my description of this activity. If you like what you've seen here, please click and subscribe to my channel. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but my web guy told me it's a thing!
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Getting Someone's Attention
Much like with Greetings, this activity focuses on a deceptively complex skill; it includes a procedural description along with an evaluation form students deliver so a recipient can assess their skills at gaining someone's attention.
For neurotypical individuals, getting someone's attention may seem like a simple skill, but for those with impaired social skills, it can prove surprisingly complex. As such, it is important to immerse these learners in real-world situations, as these scenarios involve significantly more social skills than an office session would— thereby better illuminating possible issues. The skills covered on the form (e.g., timing of knocking, what one should say, eye contact, and optimal spatial distancing) are easily practiced in a variety of ways with the help of this reference sheet. An example of a surprising instance of the difficulty of this skill is when one of my students was tasked with garnering the attention of a teacher and they called out to the teacher from the classroom doorway despite the teacher standing 20 feet away and being mid-conversation with a coworker. The nuances of these interactions are incredibly important for students to learn.
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These social skills worksheets and activities for individuals with Autism and Social Pragmatic Communication Disorders target a variety of social skills, including the development of empathy, perspective taking, kinesics, listener/reader presupposition, and conversational skills.


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