Volunteering at Bernie's Book Bank

We are excited to announce two new student work sites!

Every month we will provide a concept or vocabulary that we work on as part of communication, social/emotional learning, and vocational “soft skills” teaching. In addition to giving you information about what your child is learning, you may wish to use these same concepts and vocabulary with your child. This helps skills carry over across settings and also can be a helpful frame to guide discussions as questions or challenges navigating the social world arise.

We often find that our students have trouble in conversations - with knowing what to say to initiate or continue a conversation, listening to the information others provide in order to make a connected response, or with the anxiety that comes from being unsure how to connect with and respond to others in real time. “Free information” is a helpful tool in these situations. “Free information” refers to the information others share that gives you clues as to what they want to communicate about. When we really listen we realize those around us are always sharing these clues, which takes pressure off of us to figure out what to talk about with them - the information is “free” without a lot of thinking or guesswork on our part. For example if on Monday morning someone says, “I’m so tired. My weekend was really busy”, that gives a clue that a conversation about weekends could flow fairly easily with that person. If I know the other person was ‘busy’, I can be reasonably sure that I could ask follow up questions and keep a conversation going for several exchanges. People also tend to share lots of clues about their hobbies, TV/movie preferences, pets, families, jobs, recent trips, musical taste, and food/restaurants they enjoy. Getting a conversation going can be so much more successful when these clues are listened to and built off of.

Here’s how you can try it at home:

Social Conversation Level 1: Help your child to recognize when free information was shared. What was it that was just said? What questions could you ask to find out more? (For more support, it can be helpful to provide a visual script with question words: Who?, What?, When, Where?, Why?, How?)

Social Conversation Level 2: Help your child to recognize when their own thoughts or preferences are keeping them from attending to the free information that was shared. Did what they just said match the other person’s clues? Also, at this level some young adults assume a lot from limited information. This often shows up in statements like ‘I already know, I don’t need to find out more’ or making guesses that require a yes/no response from the other person rather than asking a more open-ended question. You can respond by challenging your child to ask additional questions to see how well the information matched the ‘picture’ they had in their head. For more yes/no guess type questions, a response to encourage more open-ended questioning and listening can be “What is a more efficient way to find out the information?”

More task-related or ‘on the job’ application: What information was shared about expectations or how to do the task you were just asked to do? What questions might you still have? (You can encourage this listening and thinking by purposely leaving some information out of a request you make. Did your child identify what was missing and ask about it? If not, how did this impact his/her ability to do the task correctly?)

Try this at home and let us know how it goes! If you run into any trouble, feel free to reach out to Karen, Marney or Sandy. We would love to help!