Nurture & Nature will work collaboratively, to teach consumers and families accessing social skills training and community inclusion with committed professionalism, expertise and ethics. We serve consumers with developmental disabilities and their families. e provide effective treatment to meet measurable and meaningful goals through several social skill training programs:
PEERS
Parent-Assisted Social Skills Training to Improve Friendships
in Teens with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Ages 12-19
We provide effective social skills training through the empirical PEERS model (Laugeson, Frankel, Mogil & Dillion 2009) of social skills training to teach functional social skills within a twelve month 16 week time period using utilizing a direct model of two 2(2- hour sessions per week with peers and a peer coach (caregiver or parent)) in a group setting. per week and three hours of direct supervision a per month.
Our program begins with an evaluation and an assessment or re-assessment to determine the individual consumer’s and family’s needs. Our individualized program goals are based on utilizing integrating consumers with peers in the community and in aacross naturalistic natural settings to address social skills deficits through role-plays, perspective taking, and practice. The goal of Peers is to create lasting friendships.. Parents and caregivers will learn how to find sources of friends for the consumer and how to coach social skills through weekly homework assignments.
Domains and Programming Skill Acquisition Targets
Communication and Respondent Listener Skills
• Initiating and offering appropriate greetings
• Increasing eye contact with others when speaking
• Increasing eye contact when others are talking
• Perspective taking
• Responding to on-topic conversational exchanges chosen by others
• Creating a conversational segue (e.g. smoothly transitioning to different topics of conversation)
• Initiating conversations and entering into a conversation
• Maintaining conversations for increasing periods of time
• Maintaining conversations with the opposite sex
• Terminating conversations with friends
• Empirical and powerful strategies for addressing bullying/rumors
• Discriminating between comical vs. serious language
• Discriminating between formal vs. informal language
• Discriminating between figurative vs. literal language
• Sharing jokes and the role of humor across daily activities
• Interpreting the body language of others (e.g. open body language and social cues expressing interest vs. closed body language (e.g. crossed arms and/or crossed legs) and social cues expressing disinterest
• Initiating and offering socially appropriate goodbyes
Socialization While Creating and Maintaining Friendships
• Friendship is a choice, and how to choose friends
• How not to be a conversation hog
• What to do during a get together
• How not to police the conversation
• Discriminating and applying serious vs. comical language and situations in context
• Discriminating and identifying emotions of others
• Responding to the emotions of others
• Dispute resolution and how to deal with hurt feelings
• Accepting the perspectives of others
• Sharing feelings and expressing empathy
• Identifying social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
• Responding to social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
• Initiating individual social cues to others during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
• Permitting others to speak in the absence of interrupting while presenting active listening skills
• Tolerating the opinions of friends and agreeing to disagree with the opinions of friends
• Sharing an opinion across contextually relevant situations
• Initiating social questions with friends and peers
• Discriminating people we know (e.g. friends) from people acquaintances from people we do not know (e.g. strangers) in context
• Discriminating and responding to appropriate and/or inappropriate behaviors of strangers, acquaintances, peers, friends and family
• Maintaining a social calendar, and how to initiate a get together
• Extending and responding to social invitations
• Calling friends, peers, elders and family by name
• Initiating and responding to phone calls in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
• Initiating and responding to text messages in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
Parent Participation and Social Coaching
• Providing social opportunities in the home and community ( a requirement when entering the program)
• Learning ABA methodology and principles of reinforcement
• Participating in role plays as a priming technique, and side coaching during homework activities
• Fostering social inclusion and lasting healthy friendships
• Finding appropriate sources of friends and facilitating get togethers.
Social Play / Social Skills Training
Ages 5-12
We provide effective social skills training through community inclusion, play facilitation, pivotal response treatment and applied behavior analysis. Based on shaping and practice, role-plays, facilitated play dates, behavior rehearsal, peer modeling and reinforcement, Nurture & Nature’s programs are custom built to address the individual needs of our clients. per week and three hours of direct supervision a per month.
Our program begins with an evaluation and an assessment or re-assessment to determine the individual consumer’s and family’s needs.
Skill Acquisition Targets
Communication and Respondent Listener Skills
• Initiating and offering appropriate greetings
• Increasing eye contact with others when speaking
• Increasing eye contact when others are talking
• Increase eye contact when responding to directives
• Responding to on topic conversational exchanges chosen by others
• Creating a conversational segue (e.g. smoothly transitioning to different topics of conversation)
• Initiating conversations
• Maintaining conversations for increasing periods of time
• Terminating conversations with friends
• Addressing bullying and Functional Communication Training
• Discriminating between comical vs. serious language
• Discriminating between formal vs. informal language
• Discriminating between figurative vs. literal language
• Sharing jokes and the role of humor across daily activities
• Sharing opinions with Functional Communication Training:: “I like/I don’t like because/ when/since…”
• Interpreting the body language of others (e.g. open body language and social cues expressing interest vs. closed body language (e.g. crossed arms and/or crossed legs) and social cues expressing disinterest
• Initiating and offering socially appropriate goodbyes
Socialization While Creating and Maintaining Friendships
• Discriminating and applying serious vs. comical language and situations in context
• Discriminating and identifying emotions of others
• Responding to the emotions of others
• Dispute resolution
• Accepting the perspectives of others
• Sharing feelings and expressing empathy
• Identifying social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
• Responding to social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
• Initiating individual social cues to others during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
• Permitting others to speak in the absence of interrupting while presenting active listening skills
• Tolerating the opinions of friends and agreeing to disagree with the opinions of friends
• Sharing an opinion across contextually relevant situations
• Presenting enthusiasm when agreeing or disagreeing with the opinion of a friend
• Terminating conversations and walking away from friends across contextually relevant situations
• Initiating social questions with friends and others
• Discriminating people we know (e.g. friends) from people acquaintances from people we do not know (e.g. strangers) in context
• Discriminating and responding to appropriate and/or inappropriate behaviors of strangers, acquaintances, peers, friends and family
• Maintaining a social calendar
• Extending and responding to social invitations
• Calling friends, peers, elders and family by name
• Initiating and responding to phone calls in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
• Initiating and responding to text messages in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
Play Skills
• Asking others to play and/or join an activity
• Permitting others go first
• Taking turns
• Engaging in functional play sequences with others
• Engaging in imaginary or symbolic pretend play sequences with others
• Entering into pretend play
• Maintaining reciprocal play for up to 20 minutes
• Following the rules of a game
• Playing a game someone else has chosen
• Joining play in progress
• Introducing oneself to peers
• Try a novel game or activity
• Tolerating losing a game
• Developing peer relationships
• Sustaining peer relationships
• Joining and sustaining group activities
• Learning unspoken, contextually relevant social rules by environment(s) and social situation(s)
• Contributing and helping others while increasing community involvement
• Addressing a social audience and maintaining affect to match the age, status and culturally relevant situations for the audience members
• Addressing individualized social fears
• Presenting appropriate behavior after accessing special events training (e.g. birthdays, groups, clubs, celebrations)
• Presenting following skills with friends and leading skills with friends
Parent Training
• Providing social opportunities in the home and community ( a requirement when entering the program)
• Learning ABA methodology and principles of reinforcement
• Participating in role plays as a priming technique
• Fostering social inclusion
• Facilitating play
• Fulfilling data collection requirements
Anticipated Consumer Outcomes
Nurture & Nature is committed to family education that will teach parent(s), guardian(s), and/or sibling(s) living at the same domicile to access skill acquisition supports so consumers can achieve greater levels of independence. Working side by side with parents, families and consumers will be trained to increase the child’s social skills with the empirically validated principles of Applied Behavior Analysis, Pivotal Response Treatment and PEERS.
We target teaching behaviors through skill acquisition programming, task analysis, chaining, role-play, behavioral rehearsal, modeling and feedback.
Our programs create meaningful and measurable social skills goals with the aim to have a lasting impact on the lives of the clients and families we serve.