For young children, consultation with a psychologist can include support around development of specific skills. In session, I use a range of strategies to support skills development, including reading story books. Stories are great with young children as it tends to help reflections on different topics and support incidental learning (learning without knowing).

This book is about learning to say please and comes as a series of books around social skills development such as sharing, saying thank you, etc. The book is designed to promote reading together as it highlight words in bold that are recurring in the book.

After reading the book, I will ask the child to describe a situation when they demonstrated the skill, what was good about this situation, how it felt, how the other person react. I will also encourage a role-play or a demonstration of the skill. For slightly older children, a drawing could also follow the discussion. Alternatively, I may draw a poster to display on the fridge as a reminder of positive skills development.

During the session, I also encourage parents to notice positive behaviours as well as explaining that noticing effort and attempts towards the positive behaviours should be reinforced.

Greening, R. (2016). Puppy learns to say Please. Make Believe Ideas Ltd: Berkhamsted.