Using Boys Town Social Skills Posters in Real Practice
I run a small after-school program for kids with ADHD and mild autism spectrum diagnoses. We've been using the Boys Town Social Skills materials for about four years now, and they work, but not in the way most people expect when they first pull them up. The core set covers things like greeting someone appropriately, asking to join a group, sharing, handling disappointment, and using polite requests instead of demands. Each skill is broken into steps with simple visuals. On paper, that sounds perfect. In practice, you hit a few walls pretty quickly.
Where to find Boys Town Social Skills Posters Printables
The official source is through Boys Town's website or their partnered educational distributors. You can also find them on teacher resource sites like Teachers Pay Teachers, where other educators have reformatted or customized the original designs. The original sets are often organized by skill area and age band. For younger kids, you'll want the foundational manners and greetings sets. For older students, the conflict resolution and perspective-taking posters are more relevant. I usually download the PDFs and print them on cardstock, then laminate them. A standard 8.5 by 11 inch sheet works fine for desk-level reference, but if you're putting them on a wall or bulletin board, going up to 11 by 17 makes them actually visible from across the room. The kids don't care about the original dimensions, they care about whether they can see the text without walking up to it.
How to actually make them work with a group
The biggest mistake I see is hanging the posters up and expecting the kids to absorb the skills passively. That doesn't happen. The posters need to be referenced actively during moments when the skill is relevant or being practiced. Here's what I do: pick one poster per week. Introduce it at the start of the session, model the behavior yourself, have the kids practice it with each other, and keep the poster visible all week. By the end of the week, they're asking each other to "check the poster" when something goes sideways, which is exactly when you want it. The second mistake is using every poster at once. That overwhelms kids, especially the ones who struggle with executive function. Stick to three or four skills per month. Depth matters more than coverage. A kid who genuinely understands how to ask to join a game is better off than a kid who has seen every poster on the wall and remembers none of them. One practical detail people miss: the posters work best when they're paired with a concrete reward system, even a small one. In our program, we give a star on a group chart each time someone uses a skill from the current week's poster without prompting. The kid doesn't get anything fancy, just the star. But the visual tracking on the wall matters more than the reward itself. It makes progress visible.
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A specific problem I ran into and how I solved it
About two years in, I noticed that the "handling disappointment" poster wasn't landing with a couple of our older boys, ages ten and eleven. The poster shows a kid taking a deep breath and using words like "I feel mad." Simple enough. But these kids had outgrown that level of expression. They could articulate their frustration, they just couldn't regulate when it came up. The poster felt babyish to them and they started ignoring it outright. My workaround was to recreate the same skill framework but swap in age-appropriate language and add a physical component. I printed a new version that said things like "Name the feeling. Name the fix. Breathe. Move on." and included a small coping strategies card they could keep in their pocket. The pocket card listed actual techniques: squeezing a stress ball, counting to ten, walking away for thirty seconds, asking for a break. I made it look like a toolkit instead of a reminder for little kids. They started using it within a week. This is worth keeping in mind if you're working with older children. The Boys Town materials are excellent, but they skew toward younger elementary ages. For middle school, you'll need to adapt the visuals and language yourself. Printers and laminators don't charge extra for editing, so there's no reason not to tweak them.
What the materials don't cover (and what to use instead)
The posters handle prosocial behavior well. They don't address sensory overload, meltdowns versus tantrums, or self-stimulatory behavior. If a kid is shutting down because the cafeteria is too loud, a poster about "using gentle hands" isn't going to help. For those situations, you need occupational therapy resources or sensory diet plans alongside the social skills work. The two complement each other, but neither replaces the other.
Another gap: the posters assume a supportive environment. If the classroom or home culture rewards aggressive dominance or mocks polite behavior, the posters will fight an uphill battle. I've seen this happen in groups where one dominant kid undermines everything. The solution isn't better posters, it's restructuring the group dynamics first. That means clear consequences for disrupting others' practice time and consistent adult modeling. If you need something more clinically oriented, the Second Step curriculum covers similar social-emotional skills with more scaffolding and built-in lesson plans. It's more expensive and more work to implement, but it fills the gaps the posters leave behind. For a low-cost starting point, though, the Boys Town materials are hard to beat.
The bottom line on cost and time investment
The free printable versions online vary in quality. Some are clean scans of the originals. Others are misaligned, pixelated, or missing pages. The official Boys Town resources run about fifty to eighty dollars for a complete set depending on whether you buy digital or physical copies. That's reasonable for what you get. The teacher-made versions on resale sites sometimes offer customization, like removing certain skills or adding cultural context, which can be worth the extra five or ten dollars. Setting up a rotation with weekly skill focus takes about twenty minutes per week. Printing, organizing, and referencing the poster. That's it. The actual teaching happens during your regular sessions, not in extra time. Kids who engage well with visual anchors tend to need less verbal repetition over time, which actually saves you talking time in the long run. I keep a binder with the current week's poster, a quick activity plan, and notes on which kids are struggling with which step. It's not elaborate. One page per skill. But after four years, that binder has become the most useful thing I own for this work. It shows patterns I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Like how the "sharing" skill always regresses during transition weeks, or how the "asking for help" poster suddenly clicks after a weekend break. Those observations drive what I adjust from week to week.
The materials aren't a complete program. They're a tool. Used actively, with adaptation and consistency, they produce real results. Used as decoration, they produce nothing. The difference is whether you show up and use them the way they're meant to be used.
