Over the past five years, the authors have put together a series of programs designed to help teachers and therapists provide students with autism, Asperger's syndrome, and pragmatic language disabilities the tools necessary to improve their ability to communicate naturally within a social setting. Our programs are designed for use with preschool through middle school-aged children. The lessons that are contained within this book have all been used within our classes over the years. It has been a great pleasure to watch our students grow and learn. Because our classes have shown such improvement, we thought it necessary to put our materials together into an organized manual designed to make it easy for other professionals to teach students how to be competent social communicators. We have provided you with information, ready-to-use lessons, classroom materials, and homework. You will also find data sheets, sample goals and objectives, and parent forms. It is our intention to provide the reader with a manual full of ready-to-use materials so you as the teacher or therapist will find them easy to integrate into your classroom routines and therapy sessions.

How the book is organized

This book is written in an outline format. Each section includes an explanation or lesson plan, classroom materials, and homework materials. The first half of this book contains lessons designed to teach conversational skills. The lessons are put together in a hierarchy of difficulty ranging from providing students with prepared errorless scripts to teaching students how to use detailed original scripts that they have written themselves. Finally, there are lessons designed to fade prepared scripts, teaching students how to have conversations that require no scripting at all. The second half of the book includes a series of lessons that target other pragmatic skills that are required in order to function successfully within a social environment. These chapters teach such things as increasing the number of appropriate conversational initiations and the ability to ask varied questions. The chapter on activity schedules teaches students how to integrate the skills that they have learned into the classroom setting while varying their selection of leisure activities and accompanying social language. Finally, you will find a chapter on conversational rules, designed to teach students (ranging in ability from beginning communicators to advanced level students) how to be aware of and understand those unwritten rules of social conduct. Contained in the appendix at the end of the book is some general information on prompting, data sheets, sample goals and objectives, and parent forms. It is our hope that you, as the professional, will find everything you need to implement a successful social skills program into your classroom or therapy sessions.