A part of our speech and language therapy might include some type of game playing and alluding to good sportsmanship. Games are fun! If we don’t make learning fun, we risk losing the attention of our students. Our students also play games in their classrooms and out at recess and exhibiting good sportsmanship is an important skills. Playing games with others can tax our students with social skills and emotional regulation issues. There is a great deal of cooperation and communication that occurs when we play games so it is an opportunity for SLPs to work on multiple social skills. One skill that can be challenging for our students with social language delays is the ability to lose gracefully, also known as not being a sore loser! Besides sportsmanship and not being a sore loser, there are so many other skills needed, including the following:
- *Allowing someone else to go first,
- *Smiling and using a friendly tone of voice,
- *Not boasting or bragging when you win,
- *Following the rules of the game,
- *Taking turns,
- *Using names of others during the game,
- *Complimenting a peer when they do a good job,
- *Congratulating the winner, and more!
To help our students with social language delays, be more successful at playing games, I developed a product that not only teaches students about sportsmanship and all the social rules involved in playing games, it also provides opportunities to practice these skills, have the skills reinforced, and improve perspective-taking and inference skills Check out the movie that shows the highlights of the product: You tube Clip for Social Rules for Playing Games. You can find this product in my Tpt store here!
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Wow that was odd. I just wrote an extremely long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyways, just wanted to say great blog!