The Toby Henderson Trust - The Doorway to Early Action in Autism
Social Communication Groups
Our social communication groups are to support social interaction and communication:
- To improve children’s ability to recognise and respond appropriately to communication, improve friendships and turn taking/sharing and time.
- To improve social communication skills of children in order to develop better conversational skills and interactional skills.
- To improve communicative and general behaviour in social settings through learning and recognising appropriate and inappropriate behaviour in different settings.
Our groups are to help and support –
- Children who struggle to communicate appropriately with others.
- Children who don’t understand social rules that are applied in different situations.
- Children who have difficulty making and sustaining friendships.
- Children who don’t recognise their own or body language and emotions in others.
- Children who don’t speak to other peers or adults and plays alone.
We hope to achieve this in an enjoyable and engaging setting with a range of activities suitable for the children’s age and needs. Activities will be carried out in a small group setting across a one hour session.
We offer a number of social communication groups throughout the week. These are largely populated by children with a diagnosis of ASD who attend a mainstream school but who struggle with social interaction, making friends, understanding their own emotions and those of others. They may be quite literal thinkers who do not always recognise whether their responses are appropriate. The attending children are currently aged between 5 and 9, who may be achieving well academically but who still struggle socially. Often some of these children have attended the 1:1 intensive interaction play room sessions and have developed their language skills to move forward into a social communication group. It is always of paramount importance that the decision to join one of our groups is a well- considered and collective process, with the child’s school in full support, ensuring that being part of a group is a positive experience for everyone.