Social Skills Activities for Kids: Games and Role Plays Grouped by the Skill They Build

About this tool

Social skills activities for kids are short, playful exercises that give a child repeated practice at one specific social skill: asking to join a game, waiting for a turn, reading a face, making up after a fall-out, handling a tease. They are written here for the parent, teacher or clinician who runs them. The grouping by skill is the point. Social skills is too broad to practice; asking to join in is something a seven-year-old can rehearse on Tuesday and try at recess on Wednesday. Pick the one skill that is costing your child the most right now and work on that.

Children learn social skills mostly through play, imitation and feedback from peers, not through instruction. By early school age most can take another person's perspective, read basic facial expressions and follow the unwritten rules of a game, but the gaps between children are wide, and other children notice them. Crick and Dodge's social information-processing model is useful for adults here: a social moment involves reading the cues, interpreting them, deciding on a goal, generating possible responses and choosing one, and a child can be stuck at any of those steps. One child misses the cue that the game is full. Another reads a neutral bump as deliberate. A third knows exactly what to do and cannot stop themselves doing something else. The activity you choose should match the step that is stuck.

Two methods do most of the work. Role play is rehearsal: you act out the situation, the child practices the response, you swap roles so they experience the other side, and you replay it until it feels ordinary. It is the core of nearly every structured social skills program and of cognitive behavioral treatment for social anxiety. Social stories, developed by Carol Gray in the early 1990s for autistic children, are short first-person narratives that describe a situation, what usually happens, what other people may be thinking and what the child might do. They lower the uncertainty of a new situation before the child walks into it. Video modeling, games with built-in turn taking and puppets for younger children round out the kit.

The evidence is moderate and worth being honest about. Structured social skills training produces small to moderate gains in research reviews, with the largest effects when skills are practiced in the real setting (the playground, the classroom) rather than only in a clinic room, and when peers are involved. Social stories have mixed results: a meta-analysis by Kokina and Kern found effects ranging from strong to negligible depending on the child, the behavior and how the story was written. Generalization is the weak point of all of it. A child who can take turns beautifully with you at the kitchen table may not do it with three excited classmates. Build in practice where it counts, and expect it to take weeks rather than sessions.

A note that changes how you run every activity on this page: autistic children's social differences are differences, not deficits to drill away. Damian Milton's double empathy problem names what research increasingly shows, that misunderstanding between autistic and non-autistic people runs in both directions, and that non-autistic children and adults are also poor at reading autistic communication. Teaching an autistic child to force eye contact, suppress stimming or perform small talk is teaching them to mask, and studies of camouflaging in autistic people link it with exhaustion and poorer mental health. Aim at what the child wants (a friend to play with, a way to say no to a game they hate, a way to repair after a meltdown), build on how they already communicate, and teach the other children too. If your child is autistic or you suspect they are, look for practitioners who describe their work as neurodiversity-affirming, and treat any program built on compliance and eye contact as a reason to walk away.

The activities suit shy children, children new to a school, children with ADHD, whose friendship difficulties can come from several sources, including attention, impulsivity and how peers respond to them, children after a move or a family change, and any child who says nobody wants to play. They are not a fix for bullying, which is an adult problem to solve, not a skill gap in the victim. They are not for a child who is being excluded because of race, disability or difference; that is the group's problem. And if a child's withdrawal comes with persistent anxiety, sensory overload or distress, the first step is understanding why, not practicing harder.

The mistakes adults make are consistent. Drilling scripts until the child sounds like a recording. Correcting a social misstep in front of peers, which costs more status than the misstep did. Running the activity only after a bad day, when the child is least able to learn. Expecting one kitchen-table session to transfer to the playground. Overloading: five skills in one week means none. Treating every withdrawal as a skill deficit when it may be anxiety, exclusion or sensory overload. And forgetting to praise the attempt. A child who asked to join and was refused did the skill correctly.

Handling teasing deserves its own note because adults often confuse it with bullying. Teasing between friends is mutual and stops when it stops being funny. Bullying is repeated, intended to hurt and involves a power difference, and a child cannot be trained out of being bullied. The activities here teach a child to tell the difference, to respond to ordinary teasing with a flat or funny reply, and to go to an adult when it is not ordinary. If what your child describes is bullying, the next step is the school and the other adults, not a role play.

See a professional if a child has had no friend at all for a long stretch, is being repeatedly rejected, has regressed socially, or shows marked anxiety around other children. A pediatrician can start the process; a school psychologist, speech and language therapist or occupational therapist can assess specific skills; and a child therapist can work with you and the school together. The Social Skills Worksheets on this site are the older-child and adult version of this material, the Emotion Faces Chart is a reference for the reading-cues activities, and the Emotional Regulation Activities for Kids page covers the calming skills that make social skills usable.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the activities, the role play and social story methods, the evidence claims and the neurodiversity-affirming framing for accuracy.

References

1. Crick NR, Dodge KA. A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children's social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin. 1994;115(1):74-101.
2. Gray C. The New Social Story Book. 15th anniversary ed. Future Horizons; 2015.
3. Kokina A, Kern L. Social Story interventions for students with autism spectrum disorders: a meta-analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 2010;40(7):812-826.
4. Milton DEM. On the ontological status of autism: the 'double empathy problem'. Disability & Society. 2012;27(6):883-887.
5. Hull L, Petrides KV, Allison C, et al. "Putting on my best normal": social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 2017;47(8):2519-2534.

Social Skills Activities for Kids FAQ