autism - Social Skills Activities for Children with Autism

April 11, 2012June 27, 2026

Social skills card teaching activity for children with ASD who are isolated

To download the pdf of this kit, click on the red link here:

Social Cards PDF Download

This resource is available in Polish

This activity is also available in a PowerPoint version in case you want to “show it” rather than cut it out:

Social Cards PowerPoint Version

Social isolation is common in children with autism spectrum disorders. The reasons are obvious. They can become enthralled with preferred activities that they carry out in solitude. The social world can be tiring and frustrating and children with autism can over-compensate with down time to recover. Modern technology provides engaging self- stimulation without face-to-face social contact. Children with ASD can become bewildered and discouraged when they go about trying to socialize. The peers of children with ASD can be unaccommodating and rejecting.

I have provided for you here a social skills teaching activity to help children with ASD’s to explore social isolation. It can be played in a small group or one-on-one between an adult and a child. To play it, you need a single die. When you roll it, it directs the participant to draw a card out of one of three piles of 12 cards.

Dice — Why bother with dice in this activity? To add levity and to take an edge off the challenging content. For more on game-like elements in social skills teaching, click on the dice picture.

Roll 1 or 2: “Help the Kid” card. Each card describes a different child experiencing a unique isolation problem. You have to figure out some way to “Help the Kid” with their problem. There is more than one possible solution to each.

Roll 3 or 4: “Fix the Thought” card. Each card shows a different thought or belief which can either contribute to social isolation or make loneliness hurt more. You have to think of one or more thoughts or beliefs to counter the negative thought.

Roll 5 or 6: “All about You.” These questions explore the child’s own social isolation.

Hot to make the cards and card holders: Click on the PDF download link at the top of this post.

I hope you find this social skills game activity useful.

Joel Shaul

Here is a free download of worksheets on the topic of social isolation for children on the autism spectrum.

Worksheets for Exploring Social Isolation

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

April 4, 2012July 10, 2026

Flexibility in kids with ASD – Card activity to teach this social skill to children on the autism spectrum

Children with autism spectrum disorders often experience challenges relate to rigidity. They can find if difficult dealing with changes and trying things new ways. Children on the autism spectrum can find it hard to imagine the points of view of other people and they often don’t make accurate predictions about how others will react to their own strong opinions.

The free resource featured here is one of many I offer to help raise awareness regarding rigidity and flexibility in social situations.

To print out the 36 cards and the two panels, click here:

Flexibility Cards, Activity to explore rigidity

Also available in POLISH language version

*But in case you prefer to “show” this activity rather than print it and cut it out, click below instead:

Flexibility Cards PowerPoint Version

When you print out the cards, I suggest you use cardstock or else paper which you will then laminate.

The two panels describing Rigidity and Flexibility can be used separately as a wall display or teaching aid, if you don’t intend to use the cards.

Suggestions on how to introduce the topic of Rigidity:

1. I suggest that you select your terminology carefully. Many kids with ASD learning the social skill of flexibility might not have the capacity to learn and use words such as “rigidity,” flexibility,” “cooperate,” “compromise,” etc. Far more children will be able to grasp the meaning of simpler words like “stubborn,” “bossy,” “get along with,” “let others have their way,” etc.

2. Try using language like this when starting on this topic:

“Some things around us are hard. What are some objects in this room that are hard? Other things are soft. Name some soft objects in this room. Now let’s talk about how things that we cannot see can also be hard or soft. Like our thoughts. Here are some words for thoughts that are HARD: Bossy, stubborn, [rigid], unchanging. Here are some words for thoughts that are SOFT: Flexible, agree, willing to change, willing to try, [cooperate]. Sometimes it is okay or good to to be stubborn and bossy. Like if someone is trying to get you to do something really bad, it’s great to be really stubborn and say no. Sometimes it feels really good to do something the same way over and over to make you feel safe and calm. But very often, it is not good to be rigid. Being rigid can keep you from doing good, new things. Being rigid can annoy other people. Being rigid can keep you from having friends.”

3. I have a children’s YouTube video on Rigidity – This might be a good introduction to this topic.

How to use the cards:

The cards are designed to help kids with autism to learn more about the social skills of flexibility associated with accepting other people’s thoughts and ideas and dealing with unexpected and unwanted changes. You can shuffle the cards randomly or else “stack the deck” so that cards most fitting for the child(ren) present will be drawn. Remove from the deck any cards you don’t consider relevant.

My first suggestion is that you do lots of role plays when you are doing this social skills game activity. For example, you, the adult, can pretend to be the rigid person depicted in the card. You can do the role play with another adult or with the children who are present. My second suggestion is that you strongly reinforce children when they show awareness of their own rigid traits. You can try passing out tokens or keeping score in some way to acknowledge learning about flexibility and admitting to rigid habits.

Below the downloads, you will find some links to other downloadable social skills activities on the website that particularly focus autism social skills having to do with rigidity.

I hope you enjoy this social skills activity.

Joel Shaul, LCSW

There are dozens of other free social skills games, worksheets and card activities you can download for children on the autism spectrum. Don’t miss them!

Free social skills games & activities, communication / conversation skills for kids with ASD

Free social skills games & activities, social interaction skills for kids with ASD

Free social skills games & activities, emotional regulation skills for kids with ASD

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

Green Zone Book Cover Click to Learn More

March 31, 2012July 7, 2026

TALK less and SHOW more: Many kids with autism need fewer words in social skills teaching

Many children with autism spectrum disorders can get bogged down with our spoken teaching. In this blog post, I offer some guidance on how to establish a visual oriented social skills training style for those children on the autism spectrum who appear to favor this modality.If you work a lot with children who have autism spectrum disorders, you have seen the following: A child listens to your words for a short time, and then their brain hits a kind of inner mute button, and your session or lesson is effectively finished.

button created by autistic woman — An autistic woman who at times finds verbal communication overwhelming (her website is shown on the bottom of this button) creates and sells cool jewelry, including buttons featuring visual prompts

There can be a number of reasons for this. We might be using boring words, speaking too fast, using language that is too complex, or neglecting to reference the child’s preferred interests. But a common reason for “losing your audience” in social skills training with kids on the autism spectrum is that many kids with ASD seem to learn better in a visual modality. Temple Grandin is a well-known example of a person with autism who learns visually. She articulates this beautifully in this quote: “When I think about abstract concepts such as relationships with people, I use visual images such as a sliding glass door. Relationships should be approached gently because barging forward too quickly might shatter the door.” (From Teaching Children with Autism, by Kathleen Ann Quail )

Temple Grandin, autistic person with visual learning style — Temple Grandin

There are certainly many children with autism who do not learn in a visual manner like Temple Grandin. But for the ones who do, I believe is important to keep on hand a variety of engaging and meaningful props for your social skills learning activities. Here are a few examples.

For many kids with ASD, our frequent verbal prompts regarding nonverbal factors just become part of the unwanted noise they tune out. But when you keep on hand pictures of eyes, hands, a face and a ruler, and use these as visual prompts during social skills activities, you can get much better attention and retention.

Children with ASD can tune out our words after years and years of verbally prompting to talk less, talk more, stop talking about that, and so forth. For individuals who might be withering under all this scrutiny and badgering, try a social skills teaching approach. This toy balance, available for about 15 dollars online, is terrific for social skills activities to teach reciprocity in conversation and relationships. Learn more about this here.

I invite you to explore dozens of other visual-based, engaging autism social skills training methods on this website.

Here is a one minute video that explains much of this.

Joel Shaul

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

March 27, 2012June 27, 2026

Teaching children with autism the social skill of discerning silly from serious

A free downloadable kit to help children with ASD to increase awareness of different levels of formality

Silly to Serious Explanation and Panels

Silly to Serious cards only

Silly to Serious Set, PowerPoint Version

This is also available in Polish

Young people with other autism spectrum disorders often struggle to understand what I call “levels of formality” in social situations. In a milieu where a serious bearing might be indicated for a child, a young person on the autism spectrum might behave and speak in a casual and informal manner. For some kids with ASD, the opposite can occur also, and they can at times act too proper around peers where more laid back words and actions would be more appropriate.

There are several reasons why children on the autism spectrum find this set of social skills hard to grasp. First, they tend to not easily understand the subtleties of social hierarchies and how they themselves rank within them. Second, a child with ASD often tends to have difficulty making quick shifts in attention, so if such a child is transitioned suddenly from, say, playing Wii to meeting Mom’s boss who has just stopped by the house, the child might find it extremely difficult to alter his behavior and words quickly enough. Third, many kids with autism have difficulty regulating extremes of emotion. Exerting control over feelings of excitement can be hard for them.

To help children with ASD to learn this social skill, I find it very helpful to divide levels of formality into four different levels. They are basically defined in the visual above. Then, you can help the child by saying, “We’re going into Chucky Cheese. You can be level 1 in there.” Or, at a big family get-together, you can help the child by saying, “In the backyard pool, that’s a level one. When we go inside to see great-grandpa, who is sick, that is a level 3.”

What is included in the Silly to Serious Card Activity:

1. A set of eight 8 1/2 by 11 illustrated panels

components of this ASD social skills activitiy — These are the Silly to Serious visual and word prompts for the four levels. You post them on the wall or lay them on the floor. The visuals shown here can be used alone with kids on the spectrum for social skills lessons. Printing out the socials cards below is recommended if you want to make a game out of it.These are the Silly to Serious social skills cards. There are 32. Each card poses a question or sets up a role play. These are the Silly to Serious social skills cards. There are 32. Each card poses a question or sets up a role play.

2. A set of 32 question cards you use in a game-like format to increase awareness of levels of formality in diverse social situations.

How to introduce the activity:

“People can’t be serious all the time when they are around other people. People can’t be silly all the time either. They have to be the right amount of serious or silly, depending on who they are with and what is happening.”

Now, show the Level Cards to the kids and help them to understand the varieties of social situations within each of the levels. Practice greetings and goodbyes within each of the levels. As you get into this, you may easily find you have enough to do for one or two classes or sessions without even getting to the card activity.

“We are going to play the Silly to Serious game. There are four different kinds of cards in this deck, and when you draw a card you have to do what the card says.

If you draw a “What Level” card, you have to figure out which of the four levels the person in the card is going through.

If you draw a “Fix the Mistake” card, you have to find out how the person in the card is either too serious or too silly and then fix their problem.

If you draw a “Your Own Life” card, you have to answer the question about about YOU.

If you draw an “Act it Out” the card, you have to act out what the card tells you to act out.”

I hope this social skills activity is helpful for you.

Joel Shaul, LCSW

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

March 23, 2012June 27, 2026

Eye contact in children with autism – Times to AVOID it in social skills teaching with kids on the autism spectrum

Teachers, mental health professionals and speech and language therapists all work hard to help children on the autism spectrum to improve their use of face and eye contact. However, when we rigidly insist on eye contact, we actually risk diminishing engagement in our social skill teaching activities.

All of us who are experienced in teaching young people with ASD becomes aware of this dilemma. Children with ASD ought to enhance their orientation towards others strategically in order to get more useful information during conversation. But for so many kids on the autism spectrum, practicing this social skill comes at the price of increased distress and anxiety – and decreased attention to your social skills learning activity!

Brian R. King, LCSW, a psychotherapist with autism, provides some useful insights and advice on this topic in his book, Strategies for Building Successful Relationships with People on the Autism Spectrum. As an individual with ASD, he finds prolonged eye contact uncomfortable and actually a hindrance to communication. He notes that blind people function quite adequately in conversation without the benefit of eye contact.

I have devised here a series of visuals to suggest alternatives to traditional face-to-face teaching when we are counseling and teaching children with autism spectrum disorders.

I hope you find these ideas helpful.

Joel Shaul, LCSW

traditional face to face eye contact — This is more or less the way I was trained as a psychotherapist thirty years ago.

Face, child look away — Here is one alternative. The child with autism may be able to concentrate better on what you are saying.

Face, both look away — Here, you are dispensing with most eye contact and both you and the child with ASD are looking at the same computer screen, IPAD or other instructional visual

Face, holding cards — In my own work, I keep on hand dozens of meaningful visuals. For some kids on the spectrum, it is more productive to teach by having us both look at the same object than for us to look at each others’ eyes.

March 17, 2012June 27, 2026

Pie chart visuals: Great social skills tool to help kids with ASD to talk MORE or LESS in groups or class

autism social skills speech therapy — For children on the autism spectrum who talk too much – or too little – in group situations, this is a useful visual strategy.

Children with autism who talk too much or too little in group situations

Neurotypical people find this skills difficult also! Remember that person who would not stop talking at the last party you went to? Young people with autism spectrum disorders can find reciprocal conversation skills particularly perplexing. They may say little or nothing on the playground or in class discussions. Or they may hold forth in a lecture of monologue fashion, not noticing the signs that others are becoming impatient.

Often, explaining a social skill combined with a meaningful visual will make a lot more sense for a child on the autism spectrum. This particular visual can be very helpful. If you make a few copies of the pie chart sheets below, I believe you will use them often.

How to create the pie chart visuals:

Follow the pdf download instructions below:

Pie chart prompts & directions

Grafico para la toma de turnos y conversaciones proporcionales en grupos

Polish language translation

How to use the pie chart visuals:

*Use simple language while describing the sheets. For example: “When people talk together, it’s like people sharing a pie [or cake or whatever in case the kid does not like pie!]. Everybody gets their turn to take their share. If one person is talking too much and not letting others talk, it’s not fair. He is “using up all the words.” Also, if somebody is just listening and is not sharing their own thoughts and words with the others, that’s not good. Everybody’s ideas are important.”

*One way to help a child who lectures and monologues in your class or group is to ask him to become your “helper.” Prepare for him the blank circle sheet below, and divide it into the number of kids who are present in your class or group. If you like, you can write into each “slice” the names of each person present. Then, you can ask the child to shade in with a pencil the various slices as the various children speak. This directs the attention of the monologuing child towards what others are saying and raises his awareness of proportion and reciprocity in group conversation.

I wish you success with this simple visual technique for helping kids with ASD to have better group conversation skills.

Joel Shaul, LCSW

Here is a related conversation social skills resource for reciprocity in conversation, but for when just two people are talking.

Using a Toy Balance for Talking Back & Forth

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

March 5, 2012June 27, 2026

The Conversation Box: Conversation training tool for children with high functioning autism and Asperger’s

cards for conversation training for Asperger's and high functioning autism

Children on the autism spectrum usually don’t easily grasp the many functions of conversation. Here is a good activity to help them. The various functions of two-way conversation are clearly explained and word examples are provided. It is loosely based on concepts outlined in Relationship Development Intervention (RDI). ( This activity requires some reading ability. Please see links below to conversation learning activities that rely less on reading.)

How to create the Conversation Box activity:

Follow the directions for PDF download below.

social skills activity speech therapy for kids with asperger's — Here is the box I use for my own Conversation Box cards.

Put the cards in a box. It’s nice to decorate it.

How to do the Conversation Box activity with kids on the autism spectrum:

Use words something like this:

“We are going to play the Conversation Box activity. It’s a fun activity to help us to practice all the good ways to talk back and forth with other people. Inside the box are cards showing all the good ways that people talk back and forth with each other.”

Now, show them the cards, as well as the eight prompts providing word examples for each card category.

“We will take turns reaching inside the box to randomly draw a card. When you pick a card, you have to have a back-and-forth conversation with another person here. You can look at these signs [show them the eight word prompts] to help you know what to say.”

I hope you enjoy this social skills activity.

Joel Shaul, LCSW

CLICK HERE: Conversation Box, & directions

This activity is also available in a PowerPoint version (in case you wish to show / project it instead of printing it):

Conversation Box PowerPoint

En Español: La caja de diálogos: Un método para ayudar a los niños con autismo a conversar

For dozens more free downloads for conversation and social communication,

follow this link.

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

March 1, 2012June 27, 2026

Helping kids with Asperger’s to give compliments: Worksheets for social skills teaching

worksheets for autism social skills teaching

Four-Compliment-Worksheets-Free-Download-1 Download

There are many other resources on the website to help children with ASD to learn and practice giving compliments.

Here are several:

Compliment Picture Panels

Say Something Nice Board Game

Paper Fortune Teller for Compliments

How to Play Compliment Tag

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

February 25, 2012June 27, 2026

Cognitive Distortion Thought Bubbles–Simple Cognitive Behavioral Method for kids with High Functioning Autism

Cognitive behavioral therapy method for children with Asperger's and autism spectrum disorders

Pre-written-CBT-Thought-Bubbles-Free-Download Download

This resource is also available in Polish.

CBT Thought Bubbles Teletherapy / On-Screen Version; no printing needed

Here are some other free Cognitive Behavior Therapy resources for children with autism:

8 Simple CBT YouTube Videos for Kids

Simplified CBT Worksheets for Kids

Mint New Thoughts CBT Activity

Emotion Thermometers

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.

February 19, 2012June 27, 2026

Empathy autism social skills training, Part 2: Teaching concern using photos (22 downloads for you here)

In this download, there are 22 photographs of people in distress, accompanied by very simple word descriptions. These are to help set up role plays for practicing empathy / showing concern skills with children on the autism spectrum. It is very useful to use the Showing Concern Picture Cards in combination with the Showing Concern Wall Display.

To download the Showing Concern Wall Display, please click on the link below:

Showing Concern Wall Display Download

To download 22 picture cards to practice showing concern, click on this next link below:

Showing Concern Picture Cards

Suggestions on using these empathy social skills materials:

Use the panels in the Wall Display, especially the one showing specific things to say, as word prompts.

Role play where you, the adult, play the person in distress

Role play where pairs of children play roles of distressed person and helper

Role play where you play the role of the person showing concern, but you make mistakes when you do it–with eye contact, tone of voice, what you say, etc. The kids watch and point out your mistakes. Have the kids point out your mistakes.

Joel Shaul, LCSW

Your comments on these resources are most welcome, and often helpful. Click HERE to send an email.