Chitchat Time

Many of the students we see are working on conversational skills, such as initiating and maintaining conversation with peers and other individuals.  This can be quite difficult, especially for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).  Some of the challenges of conversational skills revolve around difficulty with taking-perspective, making inferences, as well as other pragmatic language skills.  It is also quite common to have students who are able to initiate and maintain a conversation when the topic is of interest to themselves (e.g., dinosaurs, Civil War, etc.).

We made an easy and fun tool that can be used during social language groups to provide students with a variety of conversational topics.  You can choose any topics you feel would suit the interests of your students best.  Since we work with high school-age students, we made cards for the following topics:

• Music
• You Tube
• Favorite Class
• In-N-Out (This is surprisingly an all-around, favorable topic)
• Skateboarding dog
• Weekend Plans
• Team Edward vs. Team Jacob
• Recent Movies
• Angry Birds
• Pets
• Facebook
• Beach
• 2012 Olympics
• American Idol
• PlayStation
• Sports

For the conversation cards, we found images of each topic we wanted to include, then cut and pasted them on 5x8 index cards.  We laminated the cards then hole punched them to put on a ring.  For students who have difficulty formulating questions and/or making comments, you can place a prompt on the back of each card.  A few of the prompts we used were:

                   "Do you like _________?"

                   "What is your favorite __________?"

                   "That's cool."

                   "I like that too."

The conversation cards can also be used to practice making small talk.  We used a few of the more general topics (e.g., pets, weekend plans) to discuss the topic of small talk and brainstorm questions and statements that could be used to initiate small talk with various individuals.

What are some of the topics you would choose?