September 2025 Week 4

Hello again!

I hope you’re enjoying and learning a lot through these shared techniques + tips so far! 

 Continuing onto technique #3 (which I use quite often), pairing social stories with Sandtray!

 First, what is a social story? 

 A social story is a social learning based tool that can help someone, especially neurodivergent and autistic children, understand and walk through a specific life scenario/interaction. 

 It can look like a little booklet or outline that you read through +  act out with someone to prepare them for how to best react and communicate during the actual interaction or event.

 I love how Carrie Clark describes it in her article and explanation video; she goes over the definition, gives examples, and provides instructions on how to create one! 

 You can find social stories by searching the internet → here’s a full gallery created by Autism Behavior Services to check out.

  So what does a social story look like in the sand?

 Once you have a social story to work through, you can act it out in the sand with the client using miniatures and visually lay it out as you go.

 You can also create your own social story with miniatures in the sandtray, I tend to do this based on a client’s special interests! 

 Until next week,

 Amy & the SSI Team