A Holiday Lesson...

One of my favorite holiday activities with students is to role-play giving and receiving gifts, and here are some updates on that.

You can do an actual gift exchange if time permits, or use an empty box or gift bag for pretend play, but there are some ways to tech up this lesson and add context, strategy and social cognition concepts, and engagement.

This coming week I am going to have students prepare for this activity by reading Llama Llama Holiday Drama (it's available on Kindle if you don't have time to get it). This book explores anxiety and mindfulness, and contains some good "hidden rules" about the season and the meaning of giving gifts. It is also multi-denominational.

I created a thinksheet for the activity which you can access here. Feel free to Make a Copy under File if you would like to modify it for your purposes.

As you can see, the preparation steps will target asking and answering questions, using wondering and People Files about others (Social Thinking®), as well as categorization and making choices. The "Levels of Like" concept is one I learned from SLP Jenny Sojat. She presented on this at a conference and uses this to make group decisions- poll group members to get them to state whether they love, like, are ok with (the "yes" line of compromise) or dislike an idea such as an outing, game, snack, etc. In this case students would just be using to to gauge another's opinion.

Have students save a photo of the "gift" they will be giving. On iPad you can look up photos in Safari, tap to enlarge, then tap and hold to save to the Photos app. If you want to add math concepts and flexible thinking, give them a budget and ask them to look up the item on Amazon.

I'd suggest "wrapping" the gift with Bag Game. It adds an element of a hidden item as the student hands the other student the iPad.

Pre-exchange, the 5 Point Scale provides a great tool. You can emphasize the perspectives and reactions of the giver at each level as well. I like to develop scales with students by using anchor points such as a 5 and 1 and having them label the other levels.

Download my 5-Point Scale PPT template here.

Then, exchange by having students deliver their iPad "gifts" to each other! Another good strategy is to provide an explicit challenge to students to generalize the concepts and report back. For example, ask students to be aware of their reactions when receiving gifts and report back on them. This is always a good narrative development activity as well.

Happy Holidays!