In this instructional video, the presenter—an experienced autism classroom teacher—walks viewers through the newly released Autism Helper Social Skills Curriculum, focusing on Level 1 for kindergarten through second grade. She explains why a specialized social‑skills program is essential for fostering independence, empathy, and flexibility in students who often navigate challenging playground and social situations without adult support. The curriculum is organized into three leveled units, each accompanied by a master binder system, printable data sheets, and a detailed curriculum map covering problem solving, flexibility, emotion identification, empathy, and conversation skills. She highlights practical classroom resources such as anchor charts, visual symbols, adaptive books, and a Voice Volumes workbook, and demonstrates how these can be displayed on acrylic frames or a Promethean board. New features include parent/caregiver notes, ready‑made daily and bi‑weekly lesson‑plan templates, and curated links to books and videos. The program is data‑driven, offering pre‑tests, post‑tests, placement assessments, and rubrics to track each student’s growth. The presenter also shares her prep workflow: printing and hole‑punching materials, organizing them in a master binder, copying units for assistants, and using adaptive books that present real‑life social scenarios with correct/incorrect choices. She invites viewers to request a follow‑up video on lesson planning and encourages questions about the curriculum.
Chapters
I just got my hands on the brand new Autism Helper social skills curriculum and I'm gonna start prepping. Come along with me. If you've followed the Autism Helper for a long time, you probably know that I am a huge, huge believer in their curriculum. In fact, I have every single curriculum on my shelf. When I found out that we were releasing a social skills curriculum, I was over the moon. If you teach an autism classroom like I do, you know that finding a social skills curriculum that is appropriate appropriate is really difficult for your students. My goal with the social skills curriculum is that my students become more independent and can voice and communicate their needs and their wants, especially in tricky situations. Not everything out on the playground is hunky-dory. There's not always an adult there to be able to help mitigate something if something goes wrong or if our students need something. So I want my students to be able to have the language or the means of communication and know what to do in those tricky situations. I want them to learn things like empathy and flexibility, and that's really what I was looking for in a social skills curriculum. And I'm gonna tell you, Autism Helper, they knocked it out of the park. Whenever I start prepping a curriculum, the first thing I do is print everything off. This is the entire Level 1. Just like all the other Autism Helper curriculums, social skills comes in 3 different levels. In fact, some of our other curriculums come in even more levels, but this one comes in 3 different levels. Most of my students who are K, 1, and 2 are going to be in that Level 1. I love having a master binder for all my curriculum, so I grabbed a black binder that's the exact same as what I've used, and I'm going to hole punch this, put it inside, and then slip this front page right here. As I start hole punching these, I want to show you what the data sheets look like. One of my favorite things about the Autism Helper curriculum is that the data sheets are built right in, and I love that we are identifying if the child is doing this independently with some prompts or with significant amount of prompts. We're looking at this. There's also a curriculum map. Look at this, we're looking on problem solving, flexibility, we are looking at identifying emotions, empathy, conversation skills. These are the skills that I was looking for. I'm so excited about this. Each unit comes with an anchor chart, and this can be used in a variety of ways. I love to take a clear picture frame, just an acrylic one, and put this on the table when students are working so they can easily reference it, Or if my whole class is working on the same unit, I broadcast this on my Promethean board and then everybody can reference the unit while we're teaching. New for this curriculum is a parent and caregiver note to let them know what we're working on in this unit and also some really rough lesson plans. These are fantastic if you just don't know where to start. So if you do things daily, this will give you the breakdown of what to do. And if you do things biweekly, there's some lesson plans, a weekly format of what to cover, and I— oh my gosh, this is gold— links and resources. So books and videos, sharing, turn-taking. This alone saves so much time and energy. And just like all of our other curriculums, there is a rubric that shows growth for each student because we're going to identify if it's the pre-test or the post-test. We are assessing and then we're analyzing our errors, and it tells you exactly what to do. One reason that I love Autism Helper curriculum in general is that every single subject is data-driven. Every single one has pre-tests and post-tests for every unit. If you were a part of our curriculum access, you actually get placement tests for the language arts, reading, and the math, and that's just outstanding as well because then you really know exactly where to start your students. The visuals in this curriculum are outstanding. So we've got personal space, turn-taking, and picture symbols, and they are just amazing and ready to be used. Even if they're black and white like this, I love that they are just ready for me to grab and I can have an instant activity. I can have instant support for my students to be able to put into practice what I'm teaching right away. And I love this Voice Volumes, um, and it correlates directly to the workbook. So it's all together, and this is my master binder. I keep a master of every curriculum that I have, and so that's always my reference point. There is nothing worse than when the internet goes out or when you can't print and you can't get to what you need. When you have a master binder, this also allows your paras or your assistants to be able to be one step ahead of you and have those copies ready to go if you teach them how to do that. So I copy one unit at a time. So for this unit, I'm going to open my master, I'm going to grab Unit 1, all the visuals that I need, I'm going to copy those on the copier, pop them back into my mastered binder. I am super excited because this curriculum comes with adaptive books, and these correlate directly to the unit and the subject that you are working on. Um, so for example, this is Unit 1 and it is My Body, My Voice, and this is an adaptive book. And then I've got another one that I'm working on prepping that is about personal space. So let me show you those. So there's a personal space one, and it gives that example of the personal space, and then the adaptive pieces go here. I love that these are real-life social situations. So for example, what happens if I ask to hold a friend's hand and they say no? How can I respect that? What happens if I like high fives but somebody doesn't? If I want to show somebody a picture on my phone, talk about real-world examples. And look at this, this is like a prepping dream. Each one tells you what page it goes to, so there's no making a mistake. And in this book, My Body, My Voice, there's multiple choices that you can do, and so there's one correct and one incorrect, and obviously you can switch these around if you want to make it to where you can give the child choices, but it's set up to where there's one right and one wrong, and so the child can really show you some mastery of skill. So now that I have all of my prepping done, I am going to go through the list of resources and then start going through the unit and start kind of plotting out where I want to be. And obviously those are going to be loose and tentative plans. I will kind of solidify it after we've done a couple days, then I kind of know where my students are. I'm thinking that would be a great next video if I walked you through how I plan using the Autism Helper curriculum. Let me know if that's something that you want to see more of, or if you've got questions regarding this curriculum. I would love to hear them. Until next time, guys.
