Social Thinking Program

The Social Thinking program builds social emotional concepts and skills to support communication and social interaction.

The program’s principles are based on the idea that social thinking is a cognitive process that involves interpreting and responding to social cues and context. This approach, views social skills not just a set of behaviours to be learned and memorised, but rather a way of thinking about social situations and making sense of them.

The Social Thinking program uses a variety of strategies, such as stories, visual aids, games, and role playing, to help individuals build these skills.

The weekly program covers the following:

  • Developing Friendships: Building and maintaining meaningful connections with others.

  • Conversation Skills: Strategies for starting, joining and maintaining conversations while recognising different communication styles and preferences.

  • Social awareness: Understanding social cues and noticing verbal and nonverbal information.

  • Executive functioning: Building skills in planning, organisation and problem solving to support participation in everyday situations.

  • Self Advocacy: Recognising one's own needs, preferences and boundaries and developing the confidence to express these.

  • Flexible thinking: Developing strategies for navigating change, uncertainty and situations that may not go as expected.

  • Emotional regulation: Increasing awareness of emotions and individual regulation needs, and identifying strategies that support wellbeing.

  • Problem solving: Developing strategies for navigatingmisunderstandings, disagreements and challenging social situations.

  • Perspective taking: Understanding others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions based on their context and social cues.

These concepts are taught through a variety of interactive activities, including games, role-playing, and group discussions.

Families will receive weekly concept summaries with individual observations, and an end of term progress overview.

Group 1: Age 5-7 years

Group 2: Age 8-11 years

Cost: $150 per week

Duration: 45 minutes

Location: Monday afternoons at our Caulfield North Clinic alongside online options available

Register here