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Upcoming Events
North Texas Psychotherapy Associates
Lewisville, TX
Social Skills Training Groups
Children and adolescents with developmental disorders have difficulty making and keeping friends, decoding nonverbal communication, and coping with anxiety in social situations. Our program is designed to provide a safe and encouraging environment in which to learn and practice social skills, improve communication abilities, increase confidence, enhance emotional learning, and foster relationship building. Our groups are facilitated by counselors who have led groups for children with developmental delays or disabilities.
We believe parent involvement is crucial and therefore send a few sheets of homework every week with the participant. It is not heavy or difficult work for parent or child and is designed to increase positive parent/child interaction as well as identify areas for improvement. Before beginning the session, each parent will list five problem areas for their child. Each weeks lessons will be tailored to each individual based on the issues cited by parents.
For the younger participants, the emphasis is on basic social skills both teaching and discussing the real life situations surrounding these skills. For the older kids, each session will have a focus emotion incorporated into the skills training. This leads to learning while allowing the participants to explore the importance of the emotion in their life. After the training time, children are allowed to participate in expressive activities, group play therapy, video roleplay, and computer assisted social skills training games, biofeedback, and brain training websites. Our groups are designed to reward hard work with activities that are enjoyable, but remain focused on socialization.
A partial list of goals for participants include:
Here is a detailed description of the curriculum for each age group.
Age 5-8
Using appropriate voice volume
Listening skills
Personal Space
Appropriate greetings
Classroom behavior
Getting attention in a positive way
Not being the rule police
Recognizing facial expressions and body language
Recognizing feelings
Initiating, maintaining and ending conversations
Turn taking and sharing
Initiating and joining others in play
Recognizing others opinions
Being a good friend and respect
Managing anger
Ignoring distractions
Decision making and choices
Ages 9-13
Getting to know someone new
Greetings, eye-contact, appropriate voice volume, personal space
Listening skills
Initiating, maintaining and ending conversations
Joining in conversations and shifting topics
Recognizing facial expressions and body language
Recognizing feelings
Cheering up a friend
Not being the rule police
Turn taking and sharing
Initiating and joining others in play
Problem solving skills
Making mistakes
Managing anger
Dealing with rumors and teasing
Controlling emotions
Ages 13-17
Getting to know someone new
Greetings, eye-contact, appropriate voice volume, personal space
Making and keeping friends
Peer pressure and reputation
Recognizing facial expressions and body language
Recognizing feelings
Figurative language
Managing anger
Self control and consequences
Handling changes
Problem solving and decision making
Organization skills
Transitioning
Asking for help
Anger management
Learning boundaries
Depending on various skill levels and the time it might take to learn new skills, we are going to be flexible with the time we spend on each topic. It is important that these skills are not only learned in the social groups but also generalized to the home, school and other environments. We look forward to getting to know both you and your child. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns at any time.
For more information, call 972-221-7006 or send us an email.
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North Texas Psychotherapy Associates
131 Degan St., Suite 102
Lewisville, Texas 75057
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Phone / Fax: 972-221-7006
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