TeachTown Social Skills app for iPhone and iPad

TeachTown Social Skills

Students often need extra support when it comes to mastering social skills.

TeachTown Social Skills offers a comprehensive, character-based video-modeling curriculum, that has students following the adventures of four fun, relatable animated characters as they learn to cooperate, listen, respect personal space, express emotions appropriately, and more. Each target social skill is introduced and illustrated in a 2 to 3 minute animated episode and is part of a series of daily lessons that include methods for differentiating instruction, generalization activities, and homework assignments.

The TeachTown Social Skills Elementary Curriculum is designed for students who have a minimum language level of 4 years.

Each social skill domain organizes 10 targeted behaviors (e.g., “Ask Before Interrupting Play”) that are each based on an important social skill under a key theme (e.g., “Following the Rules”). Each targeted behavior features its own animated episode and six daily teacher-driven lesson plans that contain the following:

• Goal & Objective – Socially valid theme goals. Each theme focuses on one goal, and each lesson concentrates on a specific objective aimed at meeting this goal.
• Related Skills – While each lesson focuses on a specific goal and objective, they also address other important skills.
• Materials – Materials necessary to complete the lesson.
• Preparation – Each lesson is written to take no more than 20 minutes of instructional time including preparation.

The TeachTown Social Skills Middle School Curriculum is designed to target a range of essential social skills for adolescent students.

The lessons were created to meet the needs of students who have difficulties in the areas of communication, social interaction, pragmatics, self-management, problem-solving, and/or emotional awareness. The Six Behavioral Domains of TeachTown Middle School Social Skills: • Building and Maintaining Relationships • Interpersonal Skills • Problem-Solving • Self-Awareness • Personal Care • Safety and Community Participation.

TeachTown Social Skills lessons provide multiple opportunities for repeated practice and social interaction in natural settings. Lesson plans were developed to include components which were identified in 2014 as evidence-based practices for children, youth, and young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder by The National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorder. These best practices include: Naturalistic Interventions, Self-Management, Modeling, Peer-Mediated Instruction and Intervention, Scripting, Social Narratives, Social Skills Training, Video Modeling, and Visual Supports.

There are lessons to span over 5 days for each target social skill, with an additional list of extension activities and ideas. Each target skill includes a data collection tool, and many of the lessons include ready-to-use lesson materials and/or worksheets. In addition, each lesson plan describes ways to differentiate instruction and includes a “Self-Management Strategy”, which is a phrase that students can learn and memorize to help them monitor and manage their own behavior. To enhance the teacher-driven lesson plans, TeachTown Middle School Social Skills includes individual, student-led activities! These activities are an Interactive Activity (in which the students watch clips of the animated episodes and answer a series of questions), and Comic Strip Builder (in which students can create their own social comic). TeachTown School Social Skills features online assessments to help gauge students’ current understanding (and use) of the target social skills. This also includes a progress-monitoring component to track your students’ learning.