You Are a Social Detective! Teaching Curriculum & Support Guide

Bring social emotional learning into the classroom!

Thousands of schools, clinics, and homes have found the award-winning storybook, You Are a Social Detective! (Winner & Crooke, 2020), to be a practical, engaging addition to their libraries. While simply reading the storybook is educational, the social and emotional concepts are ripe for deeper teaching in whole-class and small-group settings. The You Are a Social Detective! Teaching Curriculum and Support Guide has been piloted and tested over years in large school districts. It's just the tool you need to bring important social emotional learning (SEL) into your classroom.

Help your students become Social Detectives with this easy-to-use curriculum that fits into your current teaching day. Designed as a companion guide to teach the concepts explored in You Are a Social Detective! 2nd Edition more deeply, this curriculum provides 10 structured lesson plans and visual tools to support building students’ social attention, social interpretation, and self-awareness. Discover practical strategies for teaching students to define social situations, make smart guesses, and uncover hidden social expectations. The concepts taught in these 10 lessons support the SEL areas of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and problem solving for decision making.

Each chapter is a lesson plan that includes:

• Big picture context for each lesson
• Lesson objectives
• Key vocabulary to emphasize
• Suggestions for how to introduce the lesson
• Discussion prompts
• Extension activity ideas with photo examples
• Writing prompts to extend the learning

Appendices include activity visuals (Thinksheets) for each lesson, a family letter template, a professional letter template, a literature resource guide, and writing prompts to expand teaching.

Watch a real-life example of how to teach Lesson #3: Clue Collector Club

In this short 10-minute video, Ann, a 3rd grade teacher, provides a real-life classroom example of how to teach Lesson #3 in this easy-to-use curriculum. Watch Ann teach her students how Social Detectives use the situation (place + people + what’s happening) to collect clues and create their own social magnifying glass.

Also included: Supplemental Visual Teaching Tools available online for curriculum purchasers. Each lesson has a short teaching PowerPoint to make your lessons come alive with visuals from the storybook and Turn & Talk activities. Also available are downloadable and printable Thinksheets from the curriculum. These online tools can be used to support large group, small group, or tele-education—and perfect for use on SMART Board, Google Classroom, or any other digital platform.

The multiple award-winning storybook You Are a Social Detective! 2nd Edition is a companion to the new Teaching Curriculum & Support Guide. It teaches social learners the power of observation, reading context, and interpreting clues to figure out how to respond in ways that meet their social goals. After students have worked through You Are a Social Detective, they’ll be ready to explore other books within our Superflex series.

Authors: Pamela Crooke Michelle Garcia Winner Kari Zweber Palmer

• Ages: Adult
• Pages: 64
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 9781936943913
• Published: 2022