Developing strong social skills is an essential part of helping children build meaningful relationships, gain confidence, and successfully navigate their home, school, and community environments. Our social skills programming focuses on strengthening a child’s ability to interact positively, communicate effectively, and engage appropriately with both peers and adults.
We also place a strong emphasis on emotional awareness and self-regulation. Children are taught to identify and understand their own emotions, recognize the feelings and perspectives of others, and develop functional coping strategies for managing challenges and frustrations. By fostering emotional intelligence, empathy, flexibility, and resilience, we help children build the social and emotional foundations necessary for successful relationships and greater independence.
Through individualized instruction and guided peer interactions, children learn foundational skills such as parallel play, cooperative play, sharing, turn-taking, initiating interactions, responding to others, and participating in group activities.
Opportunities to practice these skills are embedded through our structured social skills groups:
Sprouting Social Skills (Ages 18m-4)
The focus of this group is on foundational and early learner skills. This includes exploring and learning to play with toys, engage in parallel play, share and relinquish toys, sitting in small groups for learning and meals, gross motor imitation skills, learning early developmental language and communication skills.
Bridging Social Skills (Ages 4-7)
The focus of this group is on group learning and school readiness. This includes engaging in imaginative and cooperative play skills, gross motor group games and complex rules of games and tolerating losing, attending to more complex information, answering questions, engaging in conversational skills and recall events.
Social Skills Lab (Ages 5-8)
The focus of this group is on group learning for our school-aged clients. This includes engaging in turn-taking and sustained play with peers, controlling impulses and emotional regulation skills, task completion for more challenging skills, planning and organizing, flexibility, multi-tasking, and complex conversational skills.
Rooting Social Skills (Ages 6+)
The focus of this group is on gaining greater independence with communication, learning to use visuals to support transitions between preferred and less preferred tasks, independence with meals and self-care needs, exploring social interests and sustained play alone or with a small group of peers.