Importance of Social Stories

We have had the opportunity to look at some social stories and how they would benefit some students that we may have in our class. I have had some experience with social stories but not a lot so it was a good refresher on how to write them and what to make sure we include such as the story should be written in the first person. I have only had a opportunity to do social stories in a book format so when the chance to make a video story came up I was quite excited. This would be a new adventure for me. Once we formed our group (Shelley, Jill, sacha and myself) we proceeded to do up our story and decide how we were going to film it. Lucky for me I got to be the actor. It was surprising how quick it was to video. When you don't have to worry about voices doing the actions was a piece of cake. What we didn't realize was how difficult and time consuming the editing part would take. I am sure if we did these often the editing would get easier and quicker but for these first few times it did seem quite confusing. We really had a great time doing the video.

Now it was our turn to come up with a scenerio and make our own video social story. We came up with many ideas but decided to do own for takeing the bus home from school. Again it didn't take long to come up with the differnt clips and what we were going to say. Once we broke the task up in little steps it was quite simple. We arrived this morning with all our props and we mapped out what we would do in each block. the filming took under a half hour and was a lot of fun. You got to wonder what people think as they walk by. The editing didn't get much easier the second time around. Thanks to Shelley's perserverence we got through the little snags and finished just before the end of class.

I do believe that these stories help students work through a situation that may be stressful for them or where they may exhibit some unwanted behaviors. It focuses on the positive behavior that we want to see instead of the negative behavior. The nice thing about the video stories is that the student is able to upload their videos to their iPod touched and watch them frequently (just before the event).