Each year, every teacher at my school receives a $50 purchase order to spend on supplies, curriculum, or materials for our classrooms. It’s definitely not much, but I was so happy with my purchase this year that I wanted to share it with you!
Normally, I’ll buy colored card stock (for making my numerous visual schedules, break cards, and the like), a few books discussing bullying, divorce, or other issues, or school supplies. This year, however, I decided that I needed some new curriculum! Sure, I have binders upon binders of worksheets and other things, but I’m getting so BORED with them…and so are my kids.
I’d heard really good things about the Superflex Curriculum and read a few good reviews online, so I decided to give it a try. It’s a Superhero comic book-based curriculum for students in grades 2-5 to help teach social skills and behavior regulation. If nothing else, I thought that since it featured superheroes and villains in a comic book format, it’d be my best shot to compete with the video games, movies, and TV shows my kids are interested in! And lucky for me, the starter set came in at just under $50! Perfect 🙂
If you aren’t familiar with the curriculum, I invite you to take a look at the Social Thinking Website first! After several weeks of using it, here’s what I’ve found:
Things I Love:
– The comic books are super colorful and grab my students’ attention.
– Teacher guide includes prompting questions and really good lesson plans for organizing your instruction
– Each villain (called “Unthinkables“) has a cute name that is really easy for my kids to remember and addresses many of the social difficulties my kids have.
– Some of the books come with a CD that has all the printable pages. No more need to squish my teacher guide in to the copier and deal with crooked copies! I can just print one from my computer and make pretty copies!
Things I Wish Were Different:
– I know it’s an educational curriculum, but it makes me sad that it has to be priced like one. I have a hard time coughing out $20-$30 for a book! Also, the store sells squishy flexible brain stress balls, but I got them for super cheaper on Amazon.
– The only “comic books” available at this time are for defeating the first 3 (out of 14) villains (Unthinkables). The teacher guide provides other books that can be used to explain the remaining 11, but my kids keep wanting more of the original comic books, not random other books that I can pull in to describe the Unthinkables! I believe more are coming though.
– My original Superflex book started coming apart at the binding after only 2 weeks of use. I’m the only one who holds the book and the staples holding it together started ripping through the pages. It’s already taped up, which makes me sad!
So far, I’ve used it with students with Autism, ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Developmental Delays and it has worked very well for those students. A few of my kids with more severe Cognitive Impairments get distracted by all the action in the comic books (I have to show only 1 page at a time and keep portions of it covered) and have a hard time understanding the concept of “fictional characters,” which the teacher’s guide warns about.
Even despite a few negatives, I love this curriculum! My planning time has been SO reduced, which is wonderful. I’m still getting used to the layout of all the lessons, but my students have been paying attention, contributing appropriately to conversations about social thinking, and even using Superflex vocabulary outside my office!! “Rock Brain got in my head yesterday when I didn’t want to let my sister use the TV.” I have to say, THAT is pretty awesome! So if you’ve got some grant money, unspent purchase orders, or extra TpT earnings laying around, I highly recommend Superflex!
Note: None of the images in this post are mine. They are all from Social Thinking and Amazon. Also, I was not compensated by Social Thinking in any way for this review. It’s just something I wanted to share!
