Step Into My Sessions: YouCue Feelings Turns 11 years old!
Still one of my favorite ways to make feelings - and social thinking - visible.
As YouCue Feelings celebrates its 11th birthday this month 🥳, I’ve been reflecting on how much animations (and animation still shots) have shaped my work with students who have differences in social understanding, inference, and complex language.
Today’s newsletter, I’ll share a few stills from a real session to show how I use visuals to support deeper social meaning and richer sentence-level language—together, not separately. Plus, keep reading for a new animation recommendation. 🎞️📽️
Why Animations?
I love using videos that let us work on social understanding and complex language at the same time, in one routine. As students interpret what’s happening socially, we help them build the language that’s required to explain it.
That means we’re not only supporting their insight (perspective-taking, prediction, related emotions, problem solving), we’re also giving them a structure for communicating that insight with increasing clarity. 🧠😊 The same moment can start with a simple sentence (“He walked away.”) and then grow into richer meaning (“He walked away because he thought she was upset.” “Even though he wanted to join, he wasn’t sure what to say.”). In other words, we’re building thinking and language together, which is how real-life communication actually works. 🤔💬
Animations at Work
That’s the same lens I used in a recent session, and I’m going to show you a few still shots below to make the routine easy to replicate. 🔁▶️
Mariza, by Constantine Krystallis, was one of the very first animations I used so many years ago. It hasn’t lost any magic over the years. 🪄 Here are a series of screenshots as I worked with a student on two goal areas at once: social understanding and complex language. Love the images in this video:
The way that emotions are portrayed in Mariza convinced me years ago that animations would be a valuable tool for the students with whom I worked! 🫏📺
New Animation Recommendation
I have a NEW favorite animation to share: Outdoors, by Gift Galaxy. 🌳🌤️
It’s one of those videos that gives you so much “therapy mileage” because it’s full of clear actions, subtle emotions, and meaningful little moments that invite interpretation. You can use it to target everything from basic understanding to deeper social inference. PLUS, it’s great for narrative! Another win-win on my list of terrific animations. 📺✨
Outdoors by Gift Galaxy
💡 Here are three ways you can use it right away:
Inference & prediction: Pause the video and ask: What do you notice? What clues matter? What do you think is happening? What might happen next?
Perspective-taking & social understanding: Target “invisible” information: How are the characters' wants and plans different from each others? What do they know (or not know)? How might they feel, and why?
Complex language for explaining social events: Build sentences that hold social meaning together—because, so, but, if, when, even though. (Example: “She's going fast because they are tracking the bird,” “The bird escaped so she went downstairs to find it, but there was a lot of traffic so it was hard”) And don’t forget those Mental State Verbs!
Are you coming to CSHA in San Francisco, March 12-15th? 👀
I’m presenting on Friday, 10:45-12:15, speaking on:
Pause, Think, Figure It Out: Deepening Inference and Social Understanding
Hope to see you there – happy viewing as always!
