Updated 8/23
September is a great time to teach personal space skills with your middle and high school students during your in-person or online speech therapy or special education sessions. Of course, you may need to revisit the topic throughout the year! This blog post is on personal space activities with older students. If you are looking for personal space ideas for elementary students, you might like these products from my store:
Tiered Personal Space Packet for elementary
Boom Cards: Personal Space, elementary
Teaching the Personal Space Concept
You can start by teaching the difference between different groups of people in the teenager’s life and what behaviors or social proximity is appropriate with each group. This is my favorite way to teach it. In the example below, we discuss whether “hugging” is appropriate with family, teachers and strangers.
- Family – these are the people who live at home with students, it is ok to hug and be close to a person in my family,
- Teachers – it is not usually ok to hug teachers,
- Strangers – a stranger is someone I don’t know. I don’t know a stranger’s name. It is not ok to hug or kiss a stranger or get too close to them.
When I did brick and mortar social skills group, I would greet my students while invading their space and we would start out the group discussing how this felt for them. It prompted great discussions and funny moments!
In the humorous video below, they organize personal space into these categories:
- Public,
- Social,
- Personal, and
- Intimate.
This might be a good model to use with young adults or older high school students.
Even if you don’t use the categories reviewed in the video, it’s a funny personal space video from BBC Three that you can use to discuss reactions to personal space invasions. It is 4:07 long.
Another way to teach it is using a personal space target. Using this target to demonstrate, you would draw, write or put a picture of the student in the middle of the target (the bullseye), then use the next rings to demonstrate who it is safe to have a smaller space bubble with and who should be kept at a greater distance. Family members would be in the ring next to the bullseye and strangers would be in the outermost ring.
You can get your own (free) personal space target here!
Teach the Signs You are Too Close!
I think it’s vital to teach our older students not just the guidelines for personal space, but also how to recognize the signs that they have infringed upon the personal space of another person. These are important elements for speech therapy sessions, especially if you have a student that struggles to recognize these signs. Teach them to tune into the facial expressions and body language of other people. If they have significant needs in this area, you might want to do more in depth teaching-this prior blog post on identifying nonverbal communication in others might help!
Here’s a sample of the social narrative from my personal space packet for MS and HS.
This is a great clip for personal space, a YouTube video on the “close talker” that is 1:55. Elaine’s boyfriend invades the personal space of Jerry’s parents and others in Jerry’s small apartment.
After viewing, complete the activity that accompanies this video clip from my personal space packet for MS and HS.
Teaching Personal Space Exceptions in Speech Therapy
As with many things, there are exceptions to the general personal space rules. For example, often we have to work in crowded spaces at school or work. When there is no choice but to stand close to others, we can teach them ways to minimize disruptions, such as not making big body movements.
These exceptions are explained in my personal space packet for MS HS (which is print and no print), which also contains social scenarios about personal space where students decide if it is an example of “respect” or “invasion?” Share the pictures from the packet and use the questions under the pictures to help students make social inferences about personal space situations among family, strangers and friends.
The example below is a slide from the EASEL version of my personal space packet.
If you work in a brick and mortar school, you can also use a hula hoop during speech therapy to give students an idea of of where the personal space bubble lies! You can do this during teletherapy by drawing on your white board. If you have students that don’t infringe on the personal space of others but cannot tolerate people near them for sensory reasons, this is a good time to review polite ways to advocating for their needs, ie “can you step back, please?”
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