Bridging the Gap Social Skills Therapy Programme
Bridging the Gap’s Social Skills Therapy programme is a type of behavioural therapy designed to improve your child’s social interaction, initiation, non-verbal communication and verbal communication skills.
Social interactions do not always run smoothly and there may be times where conflict resolution skills are required. Hence, social skills therapy can teach your child how to implement socially appropriate strategies to maintain & sustain strong friendships in school.
We use a developmental methodology – “Social Thinking”, to help children effectively interact with others, helping them figure out the best way to think or act in a social situation. This helps them realise that whenever they are around others, the way they behave will affect how others think about them. This will train our children’s brains to understand and decipher what people around them might be thinking. This social thinking methodology will also teach our young learners how to create positive thoughts about themselves and others.
Our Social Skills Therapy Process
Social skills therapy uses strategies such as role-playing, video-modelling and social stories to develop your child’s play skills (turn-taking or sharing a toy), conversational skills (verbal and non-verbal language), emotional skills (managing emotions and having empathy for others) and problem-solving skills (dealing with a conflict or making a decision).
1. Initial Assessment
Our qualified educational therapists first conduct an assessment to find out the underlying issues causing poor social interaction performance. We will then be able to devise an individualized treatment plan that suits your child’s needs.
2. Goal Setting
Our educational therapist, together with our clinical director will develop goals that are in-line with the underlying issue from the assessment. These goals will be shared to the parents, in collaboration with the teachers in mainstream school. We make sure that the goals are consistently reviewed by the educational therapist and the mainstream schoolteacher.
3. Modelling and Role-playing
Modelling is one of the most effective way of teaching social skills to the children. It is a strategy in which the teacher demonstrates a new concept and students learn by observing. What they see from the teachers and from the environment is what they get. This is why we carefully plan the way we behave and socialize in a natural environment because it is what the children will learn. Moreover, we reinforce the expected behaviour through role-playing activities.
4. Feedback
We would give a weekly feedback to both parents and the mainstream schoolteachers. We would consistently have an open exchange of communication with the schoolteacher for updates. Moreover, we also provide them with strategies to help with our students’ behavior in a mainstream classroom.
5. Homework
On top of the weekly feedback, we also provide weekly homework to make sure that the goals are consistently generalized from therapy session, to mainstream school and at home. We want to ensure the consistency of the strategies used across all environments.
Signs of Poor Social Skills
- Difficulty initiating conversations with others
- Limited ability in understanding others (facial cues / body language / tone of voice)
- Interrupts others abruptly / irrelevant comments when conversing
- Unable to maintain topic of conversation
- Poor listening skills / does not respond appropriately to voice commands
- Fails to understand jokes / sarcasm / metaphors and non-literal information
- Inappropriate body language
- Does not maintain eye-contact when conversing
- Does not like to share food / toys with others