Name: It’s OK to Make Mistakes Social Story
SKU: 614b60e42fc313743d4e5bcf
Price: 39.99 USD
Availability: InStock

About this resource

What's inside this resource

The It’s Okay to Make Mistakes social story delivers a reassuring message that normalizes and validates errors in learning. Making mistakes can cause anxiety for many children, especially those on the autism spectrum. This social narrative uses a patient tone and visuals to explain expected responses to mistakes at school. The story reassures children that everyone makes mistakes when learning new things. It emphasizes teacher support and provides tips for overcoming mistakes like asking for help, trying again, and thinking positively.

Social stories outline social rules and expectations in a concrete way children comprehend. This story reduces anxiety around imperfection and fosters a growth mindset. It guides children to see mistakes as an opportunity to improve rather than a source of shame. Teachers, counselors, and parents can use this story to shape perspectives on academic challenges. It builds confidence and resilience by teaching mistake-making is a normal part of gaining knowledge. Children learn to self-regulate emotional reactions and adopt constructive responses. For neurodiverse learners, the clear explanations empower independent problem-solving. This social narrative delivers a lesson essential for social-emotional health - we must allow ourselves and others to be imperfect. It provides a research-backed way to instill this outlook through modeling and reassurance.

These books should be used over and over to reinforce the point so I would suggest either putting the pages into a display book or laminating and binding them.

Clipart images courtesy of Kari Bolt.

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Recognise and name the frustration that follows getting an answer wrong, rather than acting on it
Repeat the reassurance that everyone makes mistakes sometimes and apply it to their own work
Choose one of four named responses to a mistake: positive self-talk, a neat crossing-out, an eraser and a retry, or asking the teacher for help

Teaching tips

The guidance page asks for a distraction-free one-to-one setting and two readings the first time, then regular revisiting; a single reading is the mistake it explicitly warns against
Work the story into a fixed point in the child's day so it is familiar before it is needed
The story can be read at the moment a mistake upsets the child, but the guidance page is clear it must not read as a punishment
The four strategies are separate pages, so a child who is not ready for all of them can be given one page as a reminder card
Pages carry one sentence each, which makes them suitable for binding into a display book or laminating for repeated handling

Skills covered

Emotional recognition — the child reads a page that names their own reaction, "It makes me feel angry and frustrated with myself", before any solution is offered.
Positive self-talk — one page scripts the exact sentence the child can say to themselves after an error: "That's OK, I'll just try again."
Practical error correction — separate pages show putting a neat line through a mistake and using an eraser to rub it out and try again.
Help-seeking — a page tells the child that when they are unsure what to do they can always ask the teacher, giving a named alternative to freezing or giving up.
Adult delivery of a social story — the guidance page sets out the setting, the two initial readings, the revisiting schedule and the praise that make the format work.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

In It’s OK to Make Mistakes Social Story, how is the story meant to be shared with a child?

One-to-one, with distractions removed, read through twice the first time and then revisited regularly — the guidance page says repetition is what makes the difference, and suggests fitting it into the child's daily schedule. It can be read when the behaviour happens, provided it never feels like a punishment.

What responses to a mistake does the story actually name?

Four, one to a page: saying "That's OK, I'll just try again", putting a neat line through the mistake, using an eraser to rub it out and try again, and asking the teacher for help when unsure what to do.

Whose voice is the story written in?

The child's. Every page is first person and present tense — "When I do work at school, I do not always get the right answer" — so the child reads their own situation, feeling and plan rather than being told what to do by an adult narrator.