Dear Parents,
In this weeks Social Skills session we are covering the topic “Thinking With Our Eyes”. The concept of thinking with your eyes helps children understand that there is a purpose for observing others and the environment around them. Our eyes are like arrows, they point to what we are looking at. This helps give other people clues to what we might be thinking about. We can also look at other people and focus on what they’re looking at to help give us a clue about what they may be thinking.
Socially, we use the concept “Thinking With Our Eyes” quite frequently. When we look at others when they talk, they know that we are thinking about what they are saying, when we look at something they’re showing us, they know that we are thinking about what they are showing us. We use our eyes to make guesses or infer meaning on situations. For example, when we are with someone and they are having fun we will use our eyes to observe their facial expression and body language and we know that this person is happy so we keep the interaction going. We do not say out loud “Oh you look happy, let’s keep talking/playing this.” We think with our eyes. If we were talking to someone and they began to cry or their body language changed to portray an uncomfortable emotion, we interpret what we are seeing and change our social interaction by comforting them or finding out what is wrong.
As part of this activity, students will listen to the book Thinking With Our Eyes and look at the pictures from the book. At the end, there is an activity called a Think Sheet that has some questions to support the understanding of this social skills concept. There is also a game that they can play with someone at home that is similar to Eye-Spy except with no words. The student will find an object in the room and look at it, the person/s that they’re playing with will then follow their gaze and take a guess at what the object might be.
During the week, it would be great to have discussions about “Thinking With Your Eyes” with your child and maybe highlight some examples to help make this topic more concrete for them in their day to day life.
We hope the students enjoy this weeks topic 🙂
Miss Bruns (Occupational Therapist) & Miss Walker (Speech Pathologist)