Can I just commiserate with you about how much I hate my son's social skills group at school?? He has been in it since age 8 and we FINALLY got him out of it for the final quarter of this year at age 10. It took a HUGE amount of effort. My son DOES have an autism diagnosis and the techniques your group is using sound like a typical social skills group for kids with or without autism.
We found a CBT group (cognitive behavior therapy) to be a better fit because it made him "think about his thinking." The social skills group teaches social "rules" without making them understand them...mainly because a lot of those "rules" do not have logic behind them! For example, my son was taught to do white lies. He is extremely honest and being forced to say white lies made him feel physically sick.
The other thing we did was have him attend lots of different "typical kid" summer camps last summer. While it could have been a disaster, it showed him (and us) that he could handle himself in a variety of social situations with a variety of kids and teachers. He put everything he had been learning to good use.
We presented all this information to the school (his IEP team) at the start of the school year in hopes of decreasing/eliminating his school social skills group. After all their evaluations and deliberations, we finally got him out for the 4th and final quarter of the year.
He will be in this school until he is in 12th grade, so we were trying to work with the school, but what I really wanted to do was pull him out against their advice. So, if you need to maintain good relationships with your school personnel, you need to set up meetings to discuss the pros and cons.
The other funny thing, is that my son was doing GREAT in the actual classrooms with the actual teachers doing actual academics. It was the social skills classroom that he had problems...much like your daughter: arguing with the teacher, debating rules, etc.
Kate
