Recently, I had a new pragmatic student hop on my caseload. Weirdly enough, I haven’t had many students who work on social skills in my few years of working, and I realized I desperately needed some materials for this area. When Everyday Speech offered for me to review their app Let’s Be Social, I jumped at the chance.
Disclaimer: I was provided with a copy of this app, but the opinions are all my own. 🙂
This app allows you to teach problem solving, forming friendships, recognizing emotions, and predicting outcomes using 25 illustrated lessons.
You can choose lessons in 5 areas of pragmatic skills: personal interactions, navigating the community, school behavior, handling change, and social relationships.
To get started, tap on the lesson you’d like to teach.
You’ll see a social story with a colorful visual. Tapping “start” will bring you to questions for the student to answer about the story. You can even add your own questions to the story.
The questions are multiple choice, and the responses are immediately reinforced as to whether they are correct or incorrect.
You also have the option to add your own lesson or skill set! To add a skill set tap on “add skill set” on the left hand column and type in the category of skills you’d like to address.
To add a lesson in a given category, tap on the “add lesson” icon and create the lesson you’d want to add.
After adding the information for the lesson, you are prompted to add the questions of your choosing.
Cool, right? I happen to love this capability. Once it’s created, your icon is created and you can proceed through just like the rest of the social stories.
You can grab Let’s Be Social from iTunes for $14.99 HERE.
What I dig about this app:
- It’s easy to navigate. Prompts and labels are all throughout, making it easy to find and create what you need.
- You can add your own lessons and questions. This is a biggie! Not many apps have this type of capability. Love it.
- The variety of lessons make it relevant for lots of different pragmatic goals.
- The price is very fair for what you are able to get out of this app.
What could make it better:
- It doesn’t allow you to take data in-app. This isn’t that big of a deal for me, but I know it is for some.
- The stories are geared toward younger students, so I’d have to do a lot of story creating for it to work for my older kids.
- I kind of wish some of the questions were more open-ended instead of multiple choice, allowing for more creative responses and expressive language practice.
What do you think? Would this app help you with your social skills kiddos? 🙂
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