Michelle Garcia Winner, the Founder of Social Thinking, is shown in the documentary Life, Animated working with Owen Suskind, a young man with autism. Life, Animated was nominated for a 2017 Academy Award® in the category of Best Documentary Feature. In this short video, Michelle shows how to use the visual teaching activity from the movie.

Add-a-Thought is a strategy to practice conversational language by making comments about our own lives that connect to other participants’ life experiences and vice versa. This can be taught in a game type format; the goal is to keep each person’s communication connected to what someone else shared, which leads to the growth of the Conversation Tree. Strong Add-a-Thought comments require that players incorporate a host of related skills such as perspective taking, sharing an imagination, conversational timing, the amount of information shared at one time, etc.