I am so pleased to introduce you to a brand new book by Elizabeth A. Sautter, author of Whole Body Listening Larry at School, and Whole Body Listening Larry at Home. I am a big fan of the Whole Body Listening books so I was very excited to hear of Sautter’s newest addition, Make Social Learning Stick! How to Guide and Nurture Social Competence Through Everyday Routines and Activities.
This book is a must have resource for parents and professionals who want to use teachable moments in everyday life to help foster social learning in children that sticks.
The book begins with a little summary of all of the different components that are important in order for a child to be socially regulated, such as sensory processing and executive function skills. There is so much terminology to know in order to make sense of the social learning process, so I am happy that the book begins with a breakdown of these terms.
The next part of the book has a variety of situations and a breakdown of how to embed lessons into daily activities such as playing at the park, going to the movies, having a family meal, or going to the grocery store. There is also a section for holidays and special events. As a parent, I really appreciate this section, because I believe that it is so beneficial to incorporate natural environment intervention into my children’s daily lives in addition to the structured intervention that they receive. This creates an opportunity for the child to generalize the skills that they are learning. Not only is there a variety of activities to get ideas from in the book, but there is also a chart of all the activities that tells you which of the skills (executive functioning, emotional regulation, perspective taking, social rules, cognitive flexibility etc) that each of the activities reinforce. Brilliant!
The best part of this book for me is that Sautter incorporates tools created by some of my favourite authors and professionals in the autism field including Michelle Garcia-Winner, MA, CCC-SLP (founder of Social Thinking), Sarah Ward, MS, CCC-SLP (executive functioning expert) Kari Dunn Buron, MsEd (author of The Incredible 5 Point Scale) and Leah Kuypers, MAEd, OTR/L (author of The Zones of Regulatation). Because I use all of these professionals’ wonderful resources already in my home, I was excited to see them all brought together and used in collaboration.
I highly recommend this book to parents and professionals alike who want to have a better idea of how to incorporate social learning into everyday activities and special events. The layout makes it easy to navigate, the colourful pictures add interest and the strategies are easy to implement in everyday situations.
– Jen
Where to get this book: