Released in January 2006, this book can be easily used in tandem with the "Worksheets!" lessons. The concepts guiding the curriculum are explored in Michelle's earlier two books: Inside Out: What Makes The Person With Social Cognitive Deficits Tick and Thinking About You Thinking About Me.

"Think Social! A Social Thinking Curriculum for School-Aged Students" moves across 8 chapters of guiding lessons that start with teaching students to be part of a group, and then transitions into lessons that help students increase their self-awareness to their own behavior, explore how thinking guides all social actions, encourages students to be "social detectives", explores the indirect meaning of spoken language, discovers the importance of imagination and wonder in the social relatedness process and then studies different techniques to guide language towards conversational interaction. The last chapter in the book keeps the door open to explore many other areas of abstract social behavior and understanding that needs to be taught in conjunction with the curriculum described in the earlier chapters.

Suggested IEP goals follow each Curriculum Chapter. Furthermore, these goals are tied to selected educational standards, to help educators see how these social goals relate to academic success.

This Curriculum is intended to provide people with ideas to help them learn to explore how to teach social teaching. It is NOT intended to be thought of as the definitive and only way to teach our students.

The curriculum is designed for students from kindergarten through high school. It is expected that educators, therapists and parents still will adapt many of the lessons to the child's developmental level.

Like most of Michelle's work, the curriculum is designed to assist the near normal to way above normal intelligence child with social cognitive deficits. It is not intended to guide the learning of children with significant cognitive delays and autism; the material is too abstract for this profile of student.

One of the Social Thinking skills we work on here at the clinic is the Social Fake. For kids with Social Cognitive issues, learning the art of small talk and expected rules in all types of social gatherings (Birthdays, Holidays, Company Picnics, Playgrounds, etc.) can sometimes require a Social Fake. "Oh Aunt Martha, this pink bunny suit is just what I wanted! Now I can stay warm while playing with all of my action figures!"

Now you can tell the world that you, too are doing the social fake. 100% cotton, available in children's and adult sizes.

The idea for the "Worksheets!" book came from audience members at Michelle's conferences who asked to have a book showing more worksheets to demonstrate how to teach concepts. Some worksheets are available in her earlier two books, but the audience wanted more! Eager to please, we have now provided audience members with their request!

"Worksheets! for Teaching Social Thinking and Related Skills" is a very practical spiral bound book that provides over 250 lessons that address a wide range of topics related to social thinking. Other than the introduction to this book, the worksheets book consists entirely of worksheets.

Oops! We goofed. Please download the corrected page 253

These copy-ready worksheets have been developed over the past 6 years to help explain to students abstract concepts in more concrete ways to help them better understand the social world.

The concepts guiding the Worksheets! are explored in Michelle's earlier two books: "Inside Out: What Makes The Person With Social Cognitive Deficits Tick" and "Thinking About You Thinking About Me."

The worksheets are not only for the student but they also help guide the thinking of the educators and parents on how to more deeply explore a concept.

The spiral bind on this book allows for the educator or parent to easily photocopy the worksheets for intervention and consultation.

This Worksheets! book can also be used in conjunction with "A Social Thinking Curriculum for Teaching School Age Students", to further individualize the curri-culum to a student's needs.

The idea for the Social Thinking Posters came from observing in classrooms across America that we usually fail to provide explicit information in the classrooms to reinforce related social thinking concepts. However, a classroom cannot function if the students are not actively engaged in appropriate social behavior for that environment.

The posters provide the information in a light hearted way to continue to encourage humor in our teaching of social thinking and related skills.

The four social thinking posters deal with:

1. The Boring Moments: expected and unexpected behaviors.

2. Being Part of A Group: The four steps of perspective taking that keep us working together as a group.

3. Social Behavior Map: Filled out for the classroom environment.

4. Social Behavior Map Template: Dry Erase Surface to use and reuse with students across the day and across contexts.

It is hoped that the posters foster more explicit discussions between the teacher and students with regard to defining the varialbles that help to encourage more appropriate social thinking in the classroom environment for ALL students!

Perspective-taking, the ability of one person to consider the point of view and motives of another, is a crucial skill for successful interpersonal relations and is one that anyone with a social cognition disability will struggle with. This book addresses the different ways this problem can present itself and Michelle's current thinking on how to approach the problem. It includes exercises and activities designed to be immediately applied to the student, and it is illustrated with diagrams, tables and copy-ready handouts as well as IEP goals. This book is helpful with defining the content of a social thinking program as well as for exploring how to help kids think socially across their home and school day.

Children and young people with diagnoses such as high-functioning autism, Asperger syndrome, PDD-NOS or non-verbal learning disabilities often have difficulty with "social-cognition" -communicating effectively and solving personal problems. For such students, these are skills that cannot just be absorbed from experience but need to be taught. In this manual, Michelle Garcia Winner offers teaching techniques to help students identify and overcome their weaknesses, leading to the acquisition of skills such as initiating conversations or activities; listening and attending; understanding abstract language; taking others' perspectives; seeing the big picture; and using humor. She demonstrates how to break down these skills into manageable concepts and suggests methods of teaching them so that the student can truly understand not just what to do but also why. The volume contains many copy-ready worksheets for teachers' use, and should be useful to educators and therapists working with young people with social-cognitive deficits.

Inscribed on the Rubber Brain it is stated "Social Thinking is Flexible Thinking" to help students learn to be more abstract and flexible thinkers.

The rubber brains were ordered as holiday gifts for our students at the clinic, but became so popular that we began to provide them for sale at conferences.

Students enjoy the humor of squeezing a small, blue rubber brain while also being encouraged to think more flexibly about the size of their problems and the choices they are making. It exemplifies the humorous approach to getting our students think about their own social thinking and related skills.

Rubber chickens are used as part of educational lessons as a way to find humor in all of our social errors, that all people are prone to make.

The rubber chickens are of the highest quality Michelle could find, she particularly likes these chickens for their cute appearance sturdy body.

Rubber chickens can also be found at magic shops and many party supply stores.

Social Thinking Across The School and Home Day

The four-hour Video/DVD features a 2-hour work-shop presentation by Michelle highlighting the key points of her I LAUGH Framework along with prac-tical social and educational suggestions. The second 2-hour Video/DVD demonstrates therapy techniques Michelle uses when introducing new students to her concepts. It shows Michelle working with two groups of students (a younger group and an adolescent group) as well as two different individual treatment sessions. The Video/DVD shows how to present socially ab-stract concepts such as perspective taking, being part of a group, and using language and actions that others can interpret successfully.

The Video/DVD takes content from two of Michelle's books: "Inside Out: What Makes the Person with Social Cognitive Deficits Tick?" (2000) and "Thinking About You Thinking About Me" (2002). It SHOWS parents and professionals how to apply the material in practical, hands on situations. It was produced by Carol Gray's "The Gray Center".

DVD and Booklet:

Strategies for Organization: Preparing for Homework and the Real World

This 3.5 hour DVD and handout booklet features the highlights of Michelle's popular all day workshop on this same topic. The information on this DVD is applicable to ALL students, not just those with learning disabilities.

Michelle takes the exploration of how to develop organizational systems for homework and the real world, to a new depth.

The primary focus of this workshop is on laying out 10 steps of organization our students need to engage in to build successful study systems. Spanning topics such as developing motivational skills to understanding time estimation, Michelle attempts to shed new light on how to address a range of issues by providing clear teaching strategies.

This DVD workshop also introduces concepts to better understand what type of organizational problems our students have (static versus dynamic), while encouraging us to consider whether our own teaching approach is product or process oriented.

A handout booklet comes with every DVD, providing concrete examples of worksheets which can be used to teach more specific organizational concept.

This DVD is appropriate for parents, regular education teachers, special education teachers, SLP's, OT's, paraprofessionals, administrators and anyone else who helps all students to learn to cope in the real world.

The DVD was produced by Carol Gray's "The Gray Center". www.thegraycenter.org