Social Awareness: Linking Eyes to Thoughts & Body Language to Emotions
During this period of movement restrictions, a lot of the children will not get as much social interaction as they would normally have. So what can we do about it? Is it possible to continue working on social skills even at home?
The answer is of course! Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking curriculum is most definitely something that can be carried out at home. One place to start would be to work on the foundations of perspective-taking. One concept that Michelle focuses on is known as “Thinking with your eyes”. This concept helps the child understand that our eyes are like the windows to our thoughts.
So how do we work on this concept?
Step 1: Following Eye Gazes
First and foremost your child needs to learn how to use their eyes effectively. Sometimes children struggle to follow the eye gaze of others and this makes it hard for them to try to figure out what others may be thinking. So we first have to teach them how to follow other people’s eyes and guess what they may be looking at.
A fun game which can work on this is “I spy”. Instead of letting your child know what letter your object begins with, just gaze at an object and try to get them to guess what you may be looking at. One tip before doing this task is first to use objects that are in front of you, once your child has mastered that, move onto objects further away. Everyone in the family can join in and you all can take turns to guess what each person may be looking at!
Step 2: Linking eye gazes to thoughts
Once your child is able to accurately follow your eye gaze, next would be to look at thoughts. Play the same game of “I spy” but this time your child has to guess what you could be thinking of instead. For example, if I look at the clock, I could be thinking about what time it might be. To make it even more concrete for your child to understand, you could cut out thought bubbles and place it above your head when you are gazing at something. Your child could then write something in your thought bubble which represents what you could be thinking.
You can expand on this activity by also using picture books. Look at the characters in the book and once again using the thought bubble you made, figure out what the characters are thinking. Some good books are:
The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson
Yes by Jez Alborough
Window by Jeannie Baker
Journey by Aaron Becker
As a lot of us are at home now, even using series or cartoons on Netflix or YouTube could also be used to figure out the thoughts of the characters while watching them.
Once your child is able to make the link between eyes and thoughts, they are now ready to advance to the next step.
Step 3: Body Language and Emotions
There are varying statistics out there but some researchers say that up to 93% of communication is non-verbal. Our bodies can tell people a lot about our emotions. Emotions are incredibly important for us to recognise in ourselves (to help us regulate them) and also recognise in others. Being emotionally aware can provide your child with an ability to better judge others and read situations.
If your child already struggles with identifying emotions, it would be good to focus on teaching them the primary emotions which are happy, sad, angry, and fear. You can start off by showing how each emotion looks (e.g. when we are angry our eyebrows go down, we may clench our fists etc.) and once they are able to identify it, a really fun game you could play is “emotional charades”.
It is a very simple game that once again, the whole family can get involved with. Each person will have a turn in which they will have to display an emotion either using their face or body. While the others will have to guess what emotion they might think it is. Other emotions that are a bit difficult to identify (e.g. uncomfortable or nervous) can also be incorporated into this activity to make it more challenging and fun.
Another activity that you could do with the family is to role-play different scenarios. Within each scenario, there must be one or two clear emotions. You could do this in pairs and take turns performing or guessing how the characters in the role-play might be feeling.
Like with thoughts, use picture books, videos or series on Netflix to help your child identify emotions in different characters they see. If you are able to look outside, look through a window and see if you can see people walking by. Try and figure out either their thoughts, emotions, or both. This will help your child to practice recognising these emotions and hopefully help them to identify them better in others.
Some good picture books (which can be found at https://www.getepic.com/sign-in) to use for identifying emotions are:
Fancy Nancy by Jane O’Connor
Memoirs of a Goldfish by Devin Scillian
Some good materials for emotions are:
The Zones of Regulation by Leah Kuypers
Movie Time Social Learning by Anne Vagin
For more information on how to help your child develop social awareness, check out the Social Thinking website which has many free webinars for you to watch. All you need to do is create an account.