S.O.S. : Social Skills in Our Schools

"S.O.S. Social Skills in Our Schools: A Social Skills Program for Verbal Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders and Their Typical Peers" by Michelle Dunn is an innovative approach to social skills learning.

Despite the often serious deficits children with pervasive developmental disorders exhibit, most schools do not provide social skills intervention through trained therapists to these students.

However, simply exposing children with PDD to typically developing children does little to develop their social skills.

They do not learn appropriate social interaction by 'osmosis'.

The widely tested S.O.S. program addresses this issue head-on. Operating on a schoolwide basis, the S.O.S. program consists of four major components that come together to increase the social skills of children with PDD as well as create tolerance and a sense of fairness among typical children: pull-out social skills lessons for children with PDD, social skills lessons in the classroom for all children, peer mentoring and parent information.