Classroom Support Materials

Social Narratives

It is our goal to develop a bank of Social Narratives for professionals to draw from. Please contribute to the bank, it will help not only students but your fellow professionals as well! To contribute, please email your submission to kthomas3@kumc.edu. Some of the narratives use icons from Mayer-Johnson LLC. The Picture Communication Symbols ©1981–2007 by Mayer-Johnson LLC. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Used with permission. Boardmaker™ is a trademark of Mayer-Johnson LLC.

Social Narratives are stories developed to provide learners with insight into social situations. The narrative emphasizes the significant social cues of given social situations. The story provides the learner with examples of appropriate social responses. The value of the social narrative is that they allow educators to pre-teach social situations and provide learners with strategies to respond to those situations. The narrative must be individualized to the learner’s needs and interests. Gray (1993; 1995), has identified 6 sentence types (descriptive, directive, perspective, affirmative, control, and cooperative) to construct a social narrative. The Social Narrative Bank provides users with a number of social stories to choose from. The narratives in the bank are in many different formats: Microsoft Powerpoint, Boardmaker, Microsoft Word and PDF. Feel free to use the narratives as they are presented or to individualize according to student need. The National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorders (NPDC) has identified Social Narratives as an Evidenced Based Practice. To download the NPDC’s Brief Package on Social Narratives please go to: http://autismpdc.fpg.unc.edu/content/social-narratives