Did you know that there are apps that can help your child rehearse for social situations? Or help them learn to regulate their emotions? There really is an app for everthing. Including social skills apps.
Social and Emotion Regulation Apps
I can’t believe it’s been over a decade that we’ve been using apps with Kevin. I don’t know what parents like us did before apps and devices.
Mind you, Kevin is not a kid that I can just hand a device and say “here, go do this.”
He still requires a lot of adult supervision and guidance. But I love apps because they give me skills and activities, like conversation starters, so I don’t have to think of all this stuff on my own.
It’s important to regulate screen time, but there is lots of meaningful, educational screen time to be had.
I say this only because I’m an ‘old’ Gen Xer. We weren’t raised on screens, and to some degree, we’ve been brainwashed that ‘all screens are detrimental to a child’s well-being.’ And that is not the case.
To the contrary, we’re doing our kids a disservice if we don’t teach them to be technically literate. Even though at times we have role-reversal in this house!
Apps for Social Skills and Emotion Regulation
We even use these for our typical child. I remember we went through a period where he was devastated with the concept of losing. ‘How would you feel if’ app helped us practice lots of scenarios. I have included both ios and Android apps, free and paid.
- How Would You Feel If? Select the cards you want students to see, and have them discuss their feelings about a variety of situations. The prompts include questions like, “How would you feel if … you forgot to study for your spelling test?” and “How would you feel if … your favorite football team lost?”
- Social Navigator –The Social Navigator is a revolutionary social skills app developed to assist children with social and behavioral challenges in adapting their behavior and developing life-long social skills.
- Bubble: Breathing Companion – Emotion regulation and breathing exercises.
- Understanding Inferences Fun Deck-This colorful educational App for Android has all 52 illustrated picture flashcards (plus audio of the text on each card) from the Understanding Inferences Fun Deck® by Super Duper® Publications. Select the cards you want students to see, and have them answer questions or complete sentences to help boost their inferencing and reasoning skills. Prompts include questions like, “Who might live here?” and sentences like, “Bill is sick. His mom is taking him to…”
- Breathe, Think, Do by Sesame Street – Teach the child to regulate emotions, learn patience, and think of solutions to problems.
- Super Stretch Yoga – The Adventures of Super Stretch, LLC – Children move their bodies, learn breathing exercises.
- Model Me Going Places 2 by Model Me Kids, LLC – Model Me Going Places™ is a great visual teaching tool for helping your child learn to navigate challenging locations in the community. Each location contains a photo slideshow of children modeling appropriate behavior.
- Louis Says: Preschool Educational TV Show Teaching Problem Solving and Social Skills – The objective of Louis Says is to help children develop their problem-solving skills, their social skills and to promote values such as cooperation, teamwork, communication, patience, respect, friendship and contributing to society. The lessons from the episodes are reinforced in the app with a wide variety of storybooks, memory games, puzzles, coloring activities and more!
- The Zones of Regulation: The Zones of Regulation (www.zonesofregulation.com) is a framework for thinking as well as a curriculum geared toward helping students gain skills in consciously regulating their behaviors, including the management of their emotions and level of alertness. This, in turn, leads to increased self-control and problem-solving abilities.
- Let’s Predict Fun Deck-This colorful educational app for Android has all 56 illustrated picture flashcards (plus audio of each card text) from the Let’s Predict Fun Deck® by Super Duper® Publications. Select the cards you want students to see, and have them use the cues in the pictures to figure out what happens next. You may also use these pictures to encourage conversational speech or as writing prompts.
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