Social Skills Groups will be reinstated in the summer of 2024. Please contact SNDC at (207)-219-8300 or via the form below if you are interested in placing your child in a group.
PRESCHOOL AGE TARGET AREAS:
BUILDING FRIENDSHIPS THROUGH PLAY
SNDC teaches friendship development skills of greeting, sharing, joining in, asking someone to play, and cooperating while guiding the client from functional play to pretend play.
DEVELOPING FRIENDSHIPS THROUGH PLAY
Through the use of symbolic and pretend play, demonstration, modeling, and practice, participants’ positive social communication and interaction increase, transfer, and generalize; resulting in academic and social success.
FRIENDS AND FEELINGS
Perspective taking, problem solving, and beginning conversation skills with a continued focus on interactive play.
ELEMENTARY AGE TARGET AREAS:
CATCHING ON TO CONVERSATIONS
SNDC introduces the anatomy of conversation, different types of conversations, and a multitude of purposes for engaging in conversations with peers and adults. Including verbal and nonverbal components, participants increase their basic conversation skills from initiating through ending conversations, their conversational manners and active listening skills, and the perspective-taking and social understanding that drive.
CATCHING ON TO GETTING ALONG
Introductions, play, offering help, compliments and apologies.
FITTING IN AT SCHOOL
What are the skills teachers expect from students? Social language and thinking, as well as effective communication and rule following. SNDC helps build the basics such as asking for help, listening, understanding, and following written and unwritten rules, and more.
GETTING ALONG WITH FRIENDSHIP
SNDC Teaches children to frame relationships through thoughts and behaviors. Meeting, making and keeping new friends.
MANAGING ANXIETY AND STRESS
Participants expand their insight and ability to recognize and manage anxiety and stress through awareness of their personal signs and triggers. SNDC will explore a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral strategies, and relaxation tools that work to develop confidence and ability to enter situations with assurance while using healthy emotional and behavioral responses.
MINDFUL MANNERS
Once individuals master the crucial skills of proper manners, they gain self- confidence and social proficiency that they will draw on throughout the course of their lives. Participants will master the art of proper table manners, gift giving and receiving, conversational skills, dinning out, and much more.
MOVING ON WITH FRIENDSHIP
For those with basic competency of friendship skills in less structured settings, SNDC teaches problem-solving, empathy, perspective-taking, dealing with bullies, non-verbal communication, hidden and unwritten rules of friendship, and more.
NOTABLE NEEDS
Notable Needs helps participants recognize and value their own and others’ needs so that they can interact, work and play successfully. Participants also develop empathy, self-advocacy, compromise and brainstorming skills for managing conflict with peers and adults.
SLICK SELF-CONTROL
Participants increase their emotional and behavioral skills and motivation for exercising self-control over the desire to have their own way, to have everything be predictable, and to be right and win in every situation, so they can enjoy the long-term benefits of self-management in relationships and self-esteem.
SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING & SELF-MANAGEMENT
SNDC addresses areas of social cognition and skills, perspective- taking, social appropriateness, and social boundaries. Participants will become very familiar with the idiom “Put Yourself in Someone Else’s Shoes” and how to do so in a variety of situations.
TWEENS, TEENS & YOUNG ADULT TARGET AREAS:
CONVERSATIONS IN THE COMMUNITY
SNDC increases meaning and motivation for becoming effective communicators in the community and improves basic communication and interaction skills by developing and expanding competencies in all social language skills, verbal and nonverbal, expressive and receptive, literal and interpretive.
CRACKING CURRENT COMMUNICATION CODES
SNDC teaches skills designed around the concept of non-verbal language. Most estimations state that about 85% of our communication is done via everything but words. For those on the spectrum as well as typical peers, learning body language, tone, volume, proximity, non-verbal cues, facial expressions and more are vital to social success.
FORMULAS FOR SOCIAL SUCCESS
SNDC focuses on the core of social success-honoring others’ perspectives. Both the skills and motivation necessary to do so are developed with a focus on making good impressions, establishing a positive reputation, thinking of others and recognizing what others think of them as well as respect for authority and self.
GIRLS’ SELF-AWARENESS
SNDC focuses on building a healthy “self” by exploring relationship dynamics, both friendship and romantic; a beginning awareness of basic reproductive health needs; harassment; nutrition and physical fitness; building and maintaining a positive self-image; and exploring how adapting some of our own behaviors can improve our reputation with others.
NOTABLE NEEDS
SNDC will help participants recognize and value their own and others’ needs so that they can interact, work and play successfully. Participants also develop empathy, self advocacy, compromise and brainstorming skills for managing conflict with peers and adults.
PEER RELATIONSHIPS
SNDC provides insight to the child/teen in need of practice dealing with both friendly and non- friendly peers. Responsibilities of self and peers are explored as well as relationship maintenance, conversation skills, sarcasm, conflict and more.
SELF-ADVOCACY & SELF-MANAGEMENT
Participants will learn about advocacy by honing listening skills and learning about conversation repair strategies, reputation and being assertive. Participants develop an understanding and motivation for demonstrating mature behaviors related to responsibility, self- management, and assertion to promote social success.
SOCIAL SUCCESS FOR THE YOUNG ADULT
SNDC will assist participants practicing situations in which they use previously learned social skills and the importance of demonstrating them in their current life. They will then have the opportunity, to develop a scripted situational role-play that they will use to demonstrate the social skills steps for the rest of the group. A constructive break-down of each situation and the skills used during the role-play will occur as a group discussion after each presentation. Participants will also have the opportunity to learn about well-known members of society who have also struggled with social impairments and how they became successful adults.
SUCCESS
SNDC will assist clients with executive functioning deficits, understand how the brain works, study paths to success for their future, study work and learning behaviors, and provide motivation to use and pursue the skills and paths they have and desire. Clients will also practice using strategies and systems for organization, time management and planning skills.
TEENS/TWEENS TAME TECHNOLOGY
Social media abounds and holds limitless possibilities for teens to develop online social relationships with peers, engage in online gaming activities, share talents and ideas, and practice their social skills from home. SNDC informs participants about practicing safety, social understanding and promotes expected behaviors online.
Scarborough NueroDevelopment gives you residents throughout the Portland, Falmouth and Scarborough areas a chance to go through our premier social skills courses. Schedule an appointment at our South Portland offices today!
