10 Activities for a Social Skills Group

If you’ve worked in a school with elementary students, you’ve definitely heard of social skill groups. These groups are targeted toward a specific set of skills students should be learning. A lot of times, these groups will contain both neurodivergent and neurotypical students, but not always. 

In many schools, social workers or school counselors will run these groups, but they can also be facilitated by the following team members:

• Speech and Language Pathologist
• Special Education Teacher
• Paraprofessional
• even a General Education teacher!

You don’t have to have social skills training necessarily to create a social skills group, but it is important to have some guidelines and goals in mind. Many times, students’ IEP goals will actually include objectives that can be worked on inside of social skills group. But, why do we need to create these groups in the first place?

Reasons to create social skills groups for your students to practice greater social interactions with peers:

• Builds essential communication skills
• Encourages peer relationships
• Enhances self-esteem and confidence
• Improves emotional regulation
• Promotes problem-solving abilities
• Supports classroom success
• Creates a safe, supportive environment for growth

Providing social skill practice in a safe environment offers students different ways of enhancing social development. Social relationships are part of a healthy life and if a child struggles with creating or maintaining these due to a lack of strong, basic social skills because of a child’s ability, intellectual disability, or autism struggle, we can help by implementing these tools.

Group activities are also a fun way to get more buy-in with students. They are a key piece of social skills interventions support and can be differentiated for different situations, by age group, or new skills you’d like to include.

Below you’ll find a list of 10 activities you can use in your social groups with autistic children specifically, but all children can benefit, as well.

10 Activities for Social Skill Groups

1. Emotion Charades

Objective: help students recognize and express emotions. This is a skill that can be really difficult for autistic children and those with other disabilities. It’s important to remember that games like these help students learn emotions, but in order to integrate these skills, students need practice and support in real life situations as they arise. 

It’s important to carryover these skills into any happy, sad, frustrating moments students have while in group, but also outside of group. One way to do this is to send notes home with what emotions you’ve worked on that day or ask the teacher to reinforce a concept with a read aloud in class. By ensuring the students get multiple chances of hearing and working with emotions and the language around them, we’re setting them up for greater success.

How it Works: Write different emotions on cards (e.g., happy, sad, angry, excited). Each student picks a card and acts out the emotion while others guess. You can also watch video clips and have students identify what emotions the characters are showing and what clues they used to understand it.

You can also use task cards to tackle this skill. These are some task boxes that work on recognizing emotions in pictures as well as describing specific scenarios of their own when they felt a certain time. These are also great because you can just pull them out, work on it and put them away with minimal prep!

Grab your set here.

Skills Practiced: Recognizing emotions, empathy, non-verbal communication.

2. “What Would You Do?” Scenario Cards 

Objective: Teach problem-solving in social situations. 

This is a very important skill for pre-teaching. As we all know, our social behaviors are not always the best when we’re frustrated, so this is a great game to test out scenarios that may lead to bigger feelings of frustration or anger. 

By working on these skills ahead of time, our goal is to get students familiar with responding in more appropriate and helpful ways. Rather than just reacting to their emotions without thinking about it. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’ll practice our way into perfect, text-book reactions every time, but with practice, students will start to learn the various ways they can handle problems and address them in meaningful ways. 

How it Works: Present different social scenarios (e.g., “What would you do if someone took your toy?”) and let students discuss their responses. 

Skills Practiced: Decision-making, perspective-taking, social problem-solving.

Grab this digital tool here

3. Friendship Circle

Objective: Encourage communication and active listening. 

If you’ve taken any restorative justice trainings, you may have practiced this type of activity with your students. The goal in a social group setting, is to provide visual supports to the concept of turn-taking and listening. By using an object, we’re giving students an anchor to focus on that tells them who they should be listening to and how to patiently wait their turn. It’s a great piece of nonverbal communication and it’s a way to increase social communication through patience. Autistic people can often struggle with active listening, so this activity can also help social skills development in this area, as well.

How it Works: Arrange students in a circle and give each one a talking stick or small object. The person with the object shares something about themselves while the others listen. 

Skills Practiced: Turn-taking, listening, sharing personal information.

If you want to read more about restorative practices, here is a must have book!

4. Social Story Creation

Objective: Help students learn appropriate responses in social situations. 

Social stories are a great way to work on targeted, specific skills in group therapy sessions, or social groups. They are a powerful tool to use before group begins, when typical problems arise within the group, or when we need to work on basic skills for one student in particular. Social stories are also quality behavior solutions for helping students get back on track with focus in groups. You can use pre-made social stories, or create them with students in group.

How it Works: Read or create short social stories that illustrate typical social interactions, like asking to join a game or apologizing. Discuss with the group what’s happening in the story and how people might feel. 

Skills Practiced: Understanding social cues, empathy, behavioral modeling.

Grab a couple to try out (for completely free) here!

5. Role-Playing Games 

Objective: Practice social interactions in a safe environment. 

We all wish we could give students a natural environment to practice all skills, but that’s not possible in a school setting. Instead, we can lead students to greater social skill development by crafting moments they may come up against in their everyday lives. This is where role-playing comes in. Students get to practice multiple different social scenarios in a safe environment.

How it Works: Set up role-play scenarios (e.g., ordering at a pretend café or asking to play with a group). Students take turns playing different roles. 

Skills Practiced: Initiating conversation, appropriate responses, eye contact.

6. Compliment Chain 

Objective: Boost confidence and teach giving and receiving compliments. 

This is a fun one to do with students because it’s all positive! We want all students to feel appreciated and we want them to be able to appreciate others. Giving and receiving compliments is a necessary skill we want to help students learn in the school environment. You can teach this skill in social groups, but also make sure to sprinkle this skill in whenever you can to keep it current. 

You may have a compliment day to start off the week on Mondays in group, or to end the week. You can create parameters around compliments, as well. Teaching students about the different things you can appreciate about a person; their personality, skills, creativity, humor, etc.

How it Works: Each student gives a compliment to another student, and they continue the chain around the group. Encourage genuine, specific compliments. If you want some jumping off points for students, here is a task box set that has a bunch of examples!

Skills Practiced: Self-esteem, kindness, positive interaction.

7. Body Language Bingo 

Objective: Help students identify non-verbal cues. 

Everyone loves bingo, and this game can double as a motor activity! You can also couple this game with your lesson on emotions to solidify those cross-over skills. 

How it Works: Create bingo cards with different body language cues (e.g., crossed arms, smiling, looking away). Show examples, and students mark off the cues as they identify them. 

Use these to reinforce skills as well in just a different way after you play Bingo!

Skills Practiced: Non-verbal communication, observation, social interpretation.

8. Group Games with Turn-Taking 

Objective: Reinforce the importance of waiting and taking turns. 

This is a social skills activity you can use with anything you’ve got. It’s a great substitute activity too if you need an idea! Taking-turns is one of those necessary skills that can be practiced in so many natural opportunities. 

How it Works: Play simple group games like “Simon Says” or board games that require turn-taking, encouraging students to wait patiently for their turn. 

Skills Practiced: Patience, impulse control, teamwork.

9. Emotion Matching Game 

Objective: Build emotional recognition and understanding. 

This is a great game to work on recognizing emotions. Students practice seeing an emotion and being able to name it. This is the first stepping stone in being able to fully understand emotions.

How it Works: Provide cards with faces showing different emotions. Ask students to match each face to a corresponding emotion word or scenario. 

Grab some tools to play this game here!

Skills Practiced: Emotional awareness, empathy, connecting emotions with contexts.

10. Personal Space Hula Hoop

Objective: Teach the concept of personal space. 

For students with autism, respecting personal space can be difficult. Pairing a fun game with a physical object helps solidify the skill for students. 

How it Works: Each student stands inside a hula hoop and practices moving closer to or farther from others while remaining mindful of personal space. Use discussions and examples to explain why personal space matters. 

Pair it with the book “Personal Space Camp” to help solidify their understanding.

Skills Practiced: Respect for personal boundaries, spatial awareness, body control.

When students are able to practice social skills in a small group setting, they receive so many benefits. 

• more personalized and targeted to individual needs
• easier to correct unhelpful behavior quicker
• greater flexibility

The most important piece of building social skills is to do with this the students’ needs in mind and through the lens of connection. Our goal is not simply to teach a skill for mastery, it’s to teach students to interact in a way that is meaningful and leads to them having a full life. This is the most important aspect of teaching social skills. By working on these skills through fun games and interactive lessons, students will more readily be able to use the skills in natural settings. 

When planning your social skills group make sure you rotate these games often. Even if students master the skills within one game, they will need continued practice to maintain skills. Remember that there are also so many other skills you’re reinforcing as you play these games, such as reading, motor, and emotional regulation skills. 

One activity holds the opportunity for you to integrate them into many different kinds of lessons that you’re already teaching. This ensures you’re teaching the content you need to cover, while also taking the time for this important area of need. 

I hope you find these activities helpful as you create your social skills groups for your autistic students. And remember, all students need this support!