Skillstreaming the Adolescent Lesson Plans and Activities

The purpose of Skillstreaming the Adolescent: Lesson Plans and Activities is to facilitate and support the use of this approach with adolescents in school classrooms and other direct learning settings. Each of these lesson plans are adaptable to meet the individual needs of each child or teenager. This resource helps practitioners teach the fundamental life skills necessary for adolescents to reach their goals, both academic and personal. This book additionally places emphasis on the integration of academic and behavioral learning in order to increase its utility in a variety of classroom settings. Lessons include structured activities for teachers and others to sustain instruction in a set of skills and reinforce student skill use throughout the day. A wide variety of teacher-friendly common school practices such as listening, questioning, discussing, and applying critical thinking skills are included for each skill. The lesson plans and activities in this book supplement the Skillstreaming text by providing specific learning activities, appropriate for whole classes or smaller skills groups. Activities are included for each of the 50 skills included and are grouped as follows: Group I: Beginning Social Skills Group II: Advanced Social Skills Group III: Skills for Dealing With Feelings Group IV: Skill Alternatives to Aggression Group V: Skills for Dealing With Stress Group VI: Planning Skills These lesson plans and activities are not intended to replace the direct instructional procedures included in the Skillstreaming the Adolescent Guide for Teaching Prosocial Skills, but instead are to be used after the actual direct teaching of each skill. NOTE: It is essential for successful implementation of this curriculum to first have the adolescent program book before attempting to utilize other Skillstreaming products. From the book’s Preface, Dr. McGinnis writes: “The Skillstreaming the Adolescent program text (McGinnis, 2012) provides the content that educators need to carry out direct Skillstreaming instruction. Toward the end of developing more socially competent young people, the lesson plans and activities in this book supplement the Skillstreaming text by providing specific learning activities, appropriate for whole classes or smaller skills groups. These plans create opportunities for prosocial skill instruction to be more intense and extend over a longer period of time because skill learning is integrated in classrooms with academic learning. Doing so further creates opportunities for youth to practice and generalize these important, life-long skills.” Read more