The crusade through my local library continues. This book, titled Revealing the Hidden Social Code: Social Stories (tm) for People with Autistic Spectrum Disorders, by Marie Howley and Eileen Arnold, centers on how to use and create a particular teaching tool called Social Stories.
These are basically explicit descriptions of situations or events in a person's life. Usually ones that person might or is currently having trouble with. For instance, one of the examples was for a child with sound sensitivity. The child was likely to need to take a train to see his grandparents in another part of the country, but his mother knew getting him to act calmly in so much noise and chaos was going to be a trial. So she wrote a Social Story to introduce him to the train station and the trains. Train stations are loud and sometimes chaotic, so she wrote out information about why and where they would be going in the train station, including pictures of the places in the station they would be. The idea was to prepare him for going to the station, so that when they actually went to the train station, he wouldn't be so upset by the noise, chaos, and newness of everything.
Social Stories can be adapted to pretty much any situation under the sun. While the book contained relatively few examples, the examples varied from elementary school situations to advice for break room situations at an adult job. In short, they're a tool that you can just keep using as situations pop up. While they're text-heavy, they needn't only be textwalls. Pictures, symbols, and other shorthand that has meaning to the autistic person can be used in conjunction with the words, or instead of them. The final idea is not merely to give instructions so that the autistic person understands what to do, but also to communicate the why of what they're doing.
When I first saw this book on the shelf, I wasn't able to read the second part of the title, so I only read that it was called, "Revealing the Hidden Social Code." Between the thinness of the book and the name, I thought perhaps I'd stumbled on a primer to acting normal (ie: not alarming the neurotypicals with your weirdness). I'm not really sure what would be in such a book, but this is definitely not that sort of book. Rather, it's a primer for writing Social Stories.
I was initially bemused by the concept of Social Stories, though I had heard of them. One of my friends used to work for the creator of the concept, Carol Gray. I had not, however, gotten much introduction on them, so reading several of them proved interesting. After reading a couple, I felt somewhat patronized. The language is simple, and the concepts used for the examples are things I do without any undue trauma. But of course, that reaction isn't terrible fair, since when I was little, I probably could have used these examples, or ones like them.
My major problem, after all, was not my light, sound, and touch sensitivity, or even my shoddy detail vision processing, anxiety, and depression... it was my lack of understanding of social protocols. I painstakingly learned these myself, but I imagine I was more of a trial to put up with than I might otherwise have been with some pointed instruction. I already read a lot as a child, and while I much preferred fiction to nonfiction, I was also pragmatic enough that I suspect I could have been talked around to using these stories.
I suspect something like this could be still useful to this day, but even the advanced formats are rather restrictive to use on a prickly adult like myself. I also have the capability to generalize based on past experiences, so short of, say, going to another country where all those expectations are vastly different, I'm probably fine without them.
Read this book if: You're a parent, professional, or support staff for a literate person on the spectrum, and Social Stories seem like they might help accustom them to new and potentially upsetting situations. If you're already using Social Stories and haven't read this book, I suspect you may find it helpful for improving the use and accessibility of your future and current Social Stories.
These are basically explicit descriptions of situations or events in a person's life. Usually ones that person might or is currently having trouble with. For instance, one of the examples was for a child with sound sensitivity. The child was likely to need to take a train to see his grandparents in another part of the country, but his mother knew getting him to act calmly in so much noise and chaos was going to be a trial. So she wrote a Social Story to introduce him to the train station and the trains. Train stations are loud and sometimes chaotic, so she wrote out information about why and where they would be going in the train station, including pictures of the places in the station they would be. The idea was to prepare him for going to the station, so that when they actually went to the train station, he wouldn't be so upset by the noise, chaos, and newness of everything.
Social Stories can be adapted to pretty much any situation under the sun. While the book contained relatively few examples, the examples varied from elementary school situations to advice for break room situations at an adult job. In short, they're a tool that you can just keep using as situations pop up. While they're text-heavy, they needn't only be textwalls. Pictures, symbols, and other shorthand that has meaning to the autistic person can be used in conjunction with the words, or instead of them. The final idea is not merely to give instructions so that the autistic person understands what to do, but also to communicate the why of what they're doing.
When I first saw this book on the shelf, I wasn't able to read the second part of the title, so I only read that it was called, "Revealing the Hidden Social Code." Between the thinness of the book and the name, I thought perhaps I'd stumbled on a primer to acting normal (ie: not alarming the neurotypicals with your weirdness). I'm not really sure what would be in such a book, but this is definitely not that sort of book. Rather, it's a primer for writing Social Stories.
I was initially bemused by the concept of Social Stories, though I had heard of them. One of my friends used to work for the creator of the concept, Carol Gray. I had not, however, gotten much introduction on them, so reading several of them proved interesting. After reading a couple, I felt somewhat patronized. The language is simple, and the concepts used for the examples are things I do without any undue trauma. But of course, that reaction isn't terrible fair, since when I was little, I probably could have used these examples, or ones like them.
My major problem, after all, was not my light, sound, and touch sensitivity, or even my shoddy detail vision processing, anxiety, and depression... it was my lack of understanding of social protocols. I painstakingly learned these myself, but I imagine I was more of a trial to put up with than I might otherwise have been with some pointed instruction. I already read a lot as a child, and while I much preferred fiction to nonfiction, I was also pragmatic enough that I suspect I could have been talked around to using these stories.
I suspect something like this could be still useful to this day, but even the advanced formats are rather restrictive to use on a prickly adult like myself. I also have the capability to generalize based on past experiences, so short of, say, going to another country where all those expectations are vastly different, I'm probably fine without them.
Read this book if: You're a parent, professional, or support staff for a literate person on the spectrum, and Social Stories seem like they might help accustom them to new and potentially upsetting situations. If you're already using Social Stories and haven't read this book, I suspect you may find it helpful for improving the use and accessibility of your future and current Social Stories.
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