Social Stories & Puppets: Powerful, Fun Tools to Teach Children

As parents we face a daily conundrum of opportunities and needs to coach our children about everything from conflict resolution and manners to transitions and routines. Two creative tools I love for teaching children social and life skills are social stories and puppets.

Storytelling can be such a powerful way to engage children, capturing their attention while sharing important life lessons in simple yet meaningful ways. Think of all the ways you can use puppets to illustrate the points you want to make. Both puppets and social stories offer the opportunity for active learning and communication skill building so that children are actively involved in the message you are trying to convey.

Puppets are a great tool for children to share how they feel, how their peers feel, and to work out solutions for themselves. For example asking children who are having a disagreement or a child who seems to be sad or angry to use a puppet as a character to tell how they feel about something. Or giving children a topic and asking them to make a puppet show about it. Parents,  caregivers, or teachers can also create a puppet show story to bring out issues you want to explore with your children. Including some humor, making up a song, and taking turns with the puppets can help with engaging children. You can start the story and then ask the child, what do you think happens next?

Social stories are very simple scripts using words and pictures along with talking it through out loud to explain or reinforce something, whether a concept, process, or message. The story is told in a very positive way and tailored to your child’s needs and developmental level. It can be done very casually and conversationally or sitting down in more of a story time approach.

While originated by speech therapist Carol Grey to help children with communication challenges like autism, social stories are now widely used to help typical children as well as those with different special needs learn and apply different concepts. Speech therapists and psychologists using social stories for therapeutic purposes often follow specific patterns originally based on therapist Carol Gray’s criteria, but we lay parents just using social stories for our own purposes can and should follow our own path based on our children’s personalities, issues, and perspectives.

Though traditionally used with a visual version of the story for the child to see, you can also just casually tell a story without visual cues if you do not think your child needs that. Sometimes an opportunity arises for a spontaneous story to address a situation — you can always improvise something verbally and then follow up with a printout to retell it later if you think that will be helpful. If using a printout or on screen version along with verbally discussing it, you can find clip art or use some photos of your child related to the story you are creating. The younger the child, the more pictures it should have and simpler it should be.