Implementing Social Skills Training
into Your Existing Curriculum

• In literature and stories, talk about what the characters were feeling, what choices they made, whether the outcome would have been different if they made a different choice, and how they resolved disputes in a healthy or unhealthy manner. 
• Use events in social studies, history, and economics to discuss how rulers and nations have used or abused power and control and how peace or violence has affected previous societies. Examine the history of prejudice, discrimination, violence, and peace. Talk about how nations or famous people negotiated peace settlements.
• Use the teachable moment. When something comes up in the media, at school, or in the community, talk about what happened, why it happened, how it might have been prevented, what other choices might have been available, etc. 
• Model and promote social skills and peace in your classroom. Develop a class code of conduct, recognize and praise positive and friendly behaviors, and be consistent with negative behavior. 
• Accept and model divergent ways of arriving at an answer. Support students in their mistakes and lead them to discover what they need to correct and why. 
• Use the problem-solving model for both academic and social difficulties. For example, if a student cannot figure out how to solve a math problem, model the problem solving process of:
1. What is the problem? (don’t understand this problem)
2. Brainstorm solutions (ask the teacher for help, ask a friend to help, review the chapter, skip it & go on, etc.).
3. For each solution ask:
• is fair?
• will it work?
• how will everyone feel?
• is safe?
4. Choose a solution
5. Try the solution.
6. Evaluate the solution.

The problem solving process teaches students that they are capable of solving their own problems and that there are multiple ways to solve a problem.

• Use creative dramatics like role-playing to re-enact a story and experience how characters felt, how they mediated conflict, etc.
• Use cooperative learning activities by allowing students to work in pairs or small groups on assignments or projects. You may need to take an active role in matching groups so that the students can learn from each other and practice positive social skills. Science experiments, art projects, group research projects, etc. all fit well with cooperative learning experiences. 
• Use activities in the curriculum that expand into the community, like cross-age tutoring, community service projects, peer mentoring, etc. Students take great pride in helping in the community doing academically-based projects such as cleaning up a stream, recycling, planting a garden, etc. In your math curriculum students can bring in canned food and count it, weigh and measure it, learn about volume, classify it, etc. and then donate it to the local food bank. 
• Teach feeling words in spelling and vocabulary. Challenge students to use certain feeling words in their writing. Have students write about how they solved a conflict with their friend or how a character felt and why in a story.
• Provide books that model characters with good social skills or characters that have overcome adversity in a positive way.