Perspective-taking activities middle & high school!

Perspective-taking helps us avoid rash judgements!

Many of our speech therapy students on the spectrum, or those with ADHD or mental health challenges, are impulsive in their first impressions of people and situations. The October lesson plan for social skills is devoted to perspective-taking. This post is about perspective-taking activities for middle and high school students-you can find ideas for perspective-taking with younger students here. This month, use the video, Snack Attack, a great animated wordless short for teaching the problems with rash judgements.

Things just aren’t always what they seem!

Perspective taking with Snack Attack!

Snack Attack by Eduardo Verastegui 4:41

In this animated short, a grandmother buys the last remaining bag of cookies from a train station. She gets herself comfortable while waiting for the train only to have a young man on a bench next to her help himself to her cookies. Her emotional reaction and indignation are clearly portrayed. After she boards the train we find there are two sides to every story.

This short film is full of opportunities to pause and discuss the perspective, feelings, and character traits of the grandmother and the teenager. When the grandmother gets on the train, have students share their thoughts about the grandmother and teenager. Then, at the end, ask students if their thoughts have changed.

This short film is based on a poem by Valerie Cox. Working on making inferences from text? You could also use the poem during a speech therapy session to make text inferences.

I have a social skills and langage video companion to snack attack! There are two versions: a pdf version and a Google slides version.

Other points of discussion include:

• Have their thoughts been negative about someone after a mishap only to find out later that the mishap was their own fault?
• Are they guilty of making a rash judgement only to find out later it was incorrect?
• If they were the grandmother and had a chance to apologize to the teenager, what would they say?
• Did the character traits you might have used to describe them during the first viewing of the video change when you reached the end?

Perspective-taking for middle and high school:

what’s the emotion?

The skill of dentifying emotions from facial expressions and body language is an important part of perspective-taking for our middle and high school students. Bonus: it fits nicely into fall activities or a pumpkin emotions theme.

ABC Ya has a fun build a pumpkin game that you can play while you practice using descriptive vocabulary to talk about the “small eyes” or “frowning mouth.” It’s a fun way to introduce the topic of emotiions. I also like to give an emotion and have the student choose what eyes, mouth etc. best reflect this emotion. Or, play this emotions memory game from match the memory.com. Then, have students label the emotions they see and use it in a sentence when they get a match.

If you want to work more on identifying emotions from facial expressions, you might find this prior blog post helpful on nonverbal communication.

Like an elephant in a china shop!

A blog post on perspective-taking with middle high school students wouldn’t be complete without incorporating youtube videos to garnish the attention and engagement of your students. I love using the wordless video “like an elephant in a china shop” with my students. Wordless videos help students focus in on the facial expressions and body language of the characters in the video. The character in this wordless short offers the viewer many clues about his personality and feelings with how he moves, how he is dressed and how he does his job. The second character, an elephant, is equally expressive!

I have an entire packet devoted to this video that works on perspective-taking skills as well as many other language and social skills!

I’ve gotten feedback that it works well with mixed groups!

Picture Books for Perspective-taking

Don’t shy away from using picture books with your older students! Picture books work well with older students when you have a clear purpose for your lesson. The illustrations that accompany the text leads to more complex analyses and reading between the lines! When students don’t have to focus all their energy on text comprehension, they can focus on different interpretations and perspectives. Also, exposure to picture books for older readers promotes reading for pleasure.

Here are two picture books for perspective-taking! You can read further about them below.

1. The Wolf’s Story-what really happened to little red riding hood

Fairy tales are great for teaching perspective-taking. They provide familiar material for students and opportunities to reflect on what those cherished familiar characters are REALLY thinking. In this book, the story of little red riding hood is told from the perspective of the wolf!

2. Voices in the Park

Four people enter a park, and through their eyes we see four different visions. We see through the eyes of a bossy woman, a sad man, a lonely boy, and the young girl whose warmth touches those she meets.  As the story changes from one voice to another, their perspectives are reflected in the shifting landscape and seasons. 

Go to my home page and check out the IEP goal bank on perspective-taking!

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