Are you planning lessons to teach students about nonverbal communication and tone of voice? This blog post is for you if you are teaching nonverbal communication skills to students with autism or social communication challenges. For example: recognizing facial expressions and identifying and using tone of voice. Help your students understand and recognize the common emotions we communicate through our faces and our voices. You might find this blog post on sarcasm helpful.
Nonverbal Communication: Recognizing Emotions by Facial Expressions!
Youtube Video: First, view The Secrets to Decoding Facial Expressions: 5:18 by the Oregonian.
A great video for teaching nonverbal communication! An adult female “behavioral investigator” dissects the facial expressions involved in the seven universal emotions: disgust, anger, sadness, happiness, fear, surprise and contempt. She provides specific language to identify facial characteristics of these emotions. She contrasts the expressions for “surprise” vs “fear” and ends with having the viewer guess the emotions as she makes the accompanying facial expressions. Highly recommend this one! I think it’s valuable to teach the expression for contempt as this can go unoticed by our students and she covers it in the video.
Online Activity: Then, head to to the University of Victoria’s website and pick a “let’s face it” activity from a plethora of choices! I’d recommend the “let’s face it: people categories,” which depicts faces of adults of multiple skin tones portraying the emotions of “happy, angry, sad, scared, surprised and disgusted.” It is a download that you can use online with digital annotation.
Boom Cards: If you are looking for a deeper dive into identifying emotions from face and body characteristcs, you might like this set of BOOM cards for middle and high school below.
Differentiating Facial Expressions
Youtube Video: Start with this short (1:54) youtube video “seven basic emotions” by Management Development International that presents a person with a neutral face which then changes to “disgust, anger, sadness, happiness, fear, surprise and contempt” before returning to a neutral expression. Pause at each one and have the student name the emotion and then identify how they know it is that emotion (scrunched eyebrows, frown etc). A great way to teach nonverbal communication.
Online Activity: A tricky nonverbal communication skill for many of my students is differentiating between similar facial expressions that show different emotions. Help your students attend to and distinguish changes in the eyes and mouth for 6 facial expressions with the “let’s face it” drawing emotions activity. Use this download with digital annotation. If you have extra time, play a charades activity where you take turns making a facial expression while the other guess the emotion.
Boom Cards: You might also like this set of BOOM CARDS for differentiating emotions that can look similar on people’s faces!
Tone of Voice-Identify and Practice
Tone of voice is such an important nonverbal communication skill as people tend to believe the emotion we communicate in our tone more than they believe our body language! Misinterpeting tone of voice is also at the root of many miscommunications. One way you can introduce the concept of tone of voice is through this print/no print pdf “Let’s talk about tone of voice.” This packet includes engaging games, youtube video links and accompanying activities and so much more!
This packet gives your students the opportunity to compare and contrast emotional tones, sarcasm and sincere tones and formal and informal communication.
Youtube Videos:
Tone of Voice in Communication: 8:06 minutes by Communication Coach Alex Lyons
Alex Lyons, explains tone of voice and discusses how listeners are more likely to believe nonverbal communication indicators, like tone of voice, before they believe the verbal content of our message and how emphasis on certain words changes what we are communicating. This is a nice introduction to all types of nonverbal communication, including body language.
Teaching Kids Tone of Voice: 4:26 by Communication Skills for Kids and Teens An adult female tells how emotion creates sound and stresses how others hear our tone before they hear our words. The narrator spends time discussing sarcasm so use this video if that meets the needs of your students.
Boom cards are great for brick and mortar or distance learning. Also, they can easily be assigned to google classroom. Use this set of BOOM cards called “what’s the tone?” to have students learn to identify emotion by tone of voice. Students also get practice in fixing mismatches between body language and tone of voice and saying sentences using 3 different tones of voice to get 3 different meanings!
Tone of Voice-Social Scenarios
Give your students practice with deciding on which tone of voice they should use given a social situation!
BOOM Cards: Have students put their knowledge to work by previewing social scenarios in this set of BOOM cards, “How Should I Say it?” After previewing the social scenario, students can discuss how the people in the images are feeling and then type in what they would say to them. Students can click on an emoji to hear three different tones of voice. Then, they say and record their message in the chosen tone to give them practice speaking the tones. Listening to the recording gives the opportunity for feedback!
More tone of voice ideas: teaching tone of voice
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