| | | |

Social Stories: Hero Cards & Rules

Teaching Social Skills and Rules

Social stories are a tried and tested way of teaching social skills. However, for some learners, they are too much. I needed a way to remind a student of the rules but in a way that didn’t single them out as being the focus of the story. Some people will say this won’t work as autistic children can’t generalise. Anyone who has worked with autistic children knows a lot of what people say is actually a myth or just does not apply to that individual.

Social Story Cards (Hero Cards)

When working with a number of children who struggled to process the information in a full social story I came up with the idea of Hero Cards. I needed a motivating, engaging, obvious and visual way of reinforcing expected behaviour in the classroom. The student I was working with is a great fan of lego and superheroes so HERO CARDS were born. These use simple, clear language to allow the child to process just that fact. This is different from the concept of social stories where specific situations are outlined. If they would find the wording patronising let them create these themselves!

Social Story Hero Cards Autism

Here is spiderman modelling expected interactions. as with anything these can be laminated and cut out individually. I used Inprint 3  from Widgit software to make these. the File is here but you will need the program to open it.

This version is clearly just an excuse to write about Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Ed Sheeran to add some celebrity to my blog. But this might be more age-appropriate for some children. Like social stories choosing the wording is key to success. If the language is too simplistic or complex for your child adapt it. The free powerpoint below is fully editable.

Taylor swift ed sheeran social skills autism social story rule cards

Download the file: Teaching social skills to Autistic children with the help of Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Beyonce here.

Whilst I don’t like to plant the idea of negative behaviour sometimes we need to be upfront about what Batman does not do. unfortunately he does hit people so we wont use him to model that expected behaviour!

Hero Cards Social story autism.jpg

If you would like me to create something for you let me know in the comments and I will try and add it! Or if you have any suggestions on improvements.

Additional Hero Cards:

Avengers lego rule cards - social story autism behaviour

Some Avengers school Rule reminders.

A mixed Grogu, Spiderman, Pokemon set

Ed Sheeran Autism Social Skills.jpg

Similar Posts

5 Comments

  1. These are awesome. Since Star Wars is so big right now with kids, could you make up some with that theme. Example a Jedi in training always tries their best, Don’t roar like Chewbacca when you’re upset…..take a breath, and count to five, etc.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.