Creative Social Skills Activities for Teens and Tweens

Social skills activities for teens can help young adults prepare for life after middle school or high school. Your teen will learn social skills through real-life experiences, so make sure the activities are relevant to him or her.

Social Skills Activities for Middle School

Students in middle school usually work on assertiveness, recognizing and understanding nonverbal communication, setting boundaries, and accepting differences. You can often adapt social skills activities for kids of this age group.

Stress Reduction Circuit

This simple activity allows tweens to explore different stress reduction techniques to determine which is most calming. The ability to calm yourself down in stressful situations or conversations is a vital social skill.

  1. In order to measure your results, you will need some sort of happiness chart. You can find five images of happiness and stress or write them on a piece of paper.
  2. Playing basketball, drawing, listening to music, yoga, counting backward from 10, deep breathing exercises, and running are all good ways to calm yourself.
  3. Create a “station” for each of your calming techniques.
  4. Think about something that really stresses you out or frustrates you. This thing makes you feel what stage of happiness/stress you are at in your chart.
  5. Choose a calming technique and spend about five minutes practicing it. Write down what stage you’re at on your happiness chart when the time is up.
  6. Every time you use a calming technique, repeat Step 5.
  7. What was the one that made you feel the happiest? In real life, how can you use this knowledge to cope with stressful interactions?

Nonverbal Telephone

Middle schoolers can practice using and understanding nonverbal communication with this twist on the classic talking game Telephone. This also serves as a good activity for practicing being attentive. You’ll need a small group to play this game, but you could adapt it for just two people to be more like Charades.

  1. Write a bunch of emotions on slips of paper and put them in a bowl. Emotions include angry, excited, tired, and grumpy.
  2. Stand everyone in a line so you’re all facing the same direction. You should be facing the back of the person in front of you.
  3. The person at the back of the line will secretly draw one emotion.
  4. The person at the back of the line will tap the person in front of them. This person should turn around to face whoever tapped them.
  5. The person who tapped will use 3 nonverbal clues to show their emotion, then the person they tapped will turn back around.
  6. Each successive player repeats Steps 4 and 5. They must try to use the same or similar nonverbal cues the person before them used.
  7. The last person will try to guess the emotion after they see the clues.
  8. You can play as many rounds as you want, drawing a new emotion and starting with a new player each time.

Put It in Perspective

Help tweens learn to accept differences by seeing how different perspectives can be fun and exciting. Students will need a camera with a zoom function and a program where they can alter the image. The easiest way to do this is to have them use a smartphone with photo editing capabilities.

  1. Come up with a list of different people or creatures like a grandpa, a baby, an ant, and a giraffe.
  2. Choose any object in your home or yard like a specific toy, calculator, or coat.
  3. Ask your tween to put himself in the mindset of each person or creature on your list and take one picture of the same object from each perspective. For example, from an ant’s perspective you might photograph a chair from underneath it.
  4. Tweens can then take each photo and use the editing tools to add drawings, words, or stickers to enhance the perspective that image is showing.
  5. See if you can guess which picture was taken from each perspective. Discuss why you were or weren’t able to guess correctly.

Social Skills Activities for Teenagers

Social skills teens should be focused on include respecting differences, listening with undivided attention, differences between personal and professional communication, and cell phone etiquette.

Build a Virtual World

Fun socialization websites for teens include multi-player platforms where you can create your own world. Games like these give teens the chance to think about a whole community, set boundaries, and enforce them.

  1. Choose an online gaming platform like Minecraft or Animal Crossing.
  2. Create your own world.
  3. Invite friends to the world and share the rules of your world.
  4. Interact with friends and enforce the rules when needed.

Start a Niche Social Club

Starting a social club for teens covers a lot of social skills like meeting new people, respecting differences, communication, and leading a group. These are all desirable job skills teens will need as adults.

  1. Choose a niche subject you’re interested in, experienced at, or passionate about. It could be old anime cartoons, books about mermaids, or funny needlepoint projects.
  2. Choose a group format like in-person or online.
  3. Plan out how you will create the group, organize it, invite people, meet, and what you’ll do or talk about. Make a group mission statement and behavior guidelines to keep everyone safe.
  4. You can actually create your social club or just talk about what you’ve planned.

Train a Dog

Working one-on-one with an animal can help you learn a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses in terms of social skills. By teaching a dog a trick, you’ll learn about verbal and nonverbal communication with someone very different from you, patience, and attentiveness.

  1. If you don’t have a dog, see if you can work with a family member or friend’s dog.
  2. Schedule one or more sessions to train them.
  3. Choose one trick to start with like jumping through a hoop or shaking hands. Read about dog training techniques and try the one you think will work best.
  4. Keep a journal of what worked well, what didn’t work, and any other challenges you encountered. What did you learn about yourself in the process?

Social Skills Activities for High School Students

You can adapt any social skills activities to high school homeschooling and even large high school classes. Check out social skills lesson plans or a life skills curriculum for more ideas.

Email Madness

Help high schoolers make quick decisions about personal versus professional communication with a quick email activity. Make sure all students have your email address before the activity begins.

  1. Each teen will need an electronic device capable of sending email in real time.
  2. You should also have your email account open on a separate device.
  3. Call out a recipient and subject such as “Dr. Brown, homeopathic suggestions for a headache,” or “Grandma, planning Easter.”
  4. Give students five minutes to craft and send you an email that fits the scenario you called out.
  5. At the end of five minutes, call out another scenario. Ask students to “reply” to the previous email they sent you for each round so all their answers are in one email thread.
  6. Repeat this as many times as you want.
  7. Together, look at the emails they sent. What major or minor changes were made based on the recipient and/or the subject?

Take a Virtual Art Tour

Some benefits of art activities include being assertive, sharing opinions, networking, seeing different perspectives, and networking. In this activity, you’ll want a small group of people so everyone can critique and discuss works of art. The goal is to share real opinions and feelings while being respectful of each other’s opinions.

  1. Find a virtual tour of an art museum on their website or YouTube.
  2. Stop at each piece of art and share commentary on it. How does it make you feel? Do you like it? What does it look like to you?
  3. Discuss the differences in your opinions and feelings on each work of art.

Strengthening Your Teen Social Life

You can help your teenager with social skills by incorporating social activities, social skills games, and other social skills tools into their daily lives. All of these skills will translate into personal relationships and job skills for your teen’s future.

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