Social skills. How to teach them

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I am a speech provider and want to know from your experiences the best way to teach social skills? I am finding the most practical and effective information on this topic is to get personal experiences from someone who has been there.
Also, the people I see at my clinic are mostly around 8-14.
Please any insight will help. Along with what does help please tell me less effective ways that you have seen as well. Please rant and rave and tell me what/how you wish speech therapists would go about teaching these skills.
I also posted this in a different part of the forum, but thought this was a more appropriate place for it and will delete the other thread.
Thank you

Role-playing games maybe? Something playful works around that age.

If those kids attend therapy voluntarily, why don't you ask them what they would like to learn/improve?

If the therapy is forced on them by parents or teachers, it makes no sense anyway.

Practical experience. I can't emphasize that enough. Although direct, formal social skills training can yield some basic results, it is hard for someone on the spectrum to truly internalize a skill without practicing it in an informal and practical setting.

Take them to the mall, bowling, etc, or allow them to join a club at their school...and aloow them to practice with nonjudgemental peer mentors who can support thyem. This was how I refined my social skills...by joining a youth group for people with disabilities and practicing with people I felt comfortable with.

I say this because I know many people on the spectrum who have been taught basic social skills, but have a lot of difficulty with how to utilize them in many different types of scenarios.

For reading social cues, perhaps you can show them clips of kid friendly videos, TV shows, stuff age appropriete etc. And you assist them with reading the social situation. You can pick shows that they might already watch(not cartoons) to make it fun.

Otherwise, arrange group activities do fun group things. Dont just restrict them to a therapy room. Really do activities that facilitate them getting to know each other. Its easy for us aspies to just go off in our little worlds, we might not always wanna interact with each other.

And with aspie kids, when your teaching them a new skill, you need to be very precise on the steps of the skill and the why. Because if they dont understand why you do it, they might not want to do it. And if you dont break it up into very small digestible steps they might not do it and you might be thinking. These kids arent cooperating, well its hard to cooperate when your being confused. You cant really tell them the same things you would tell NT kids. As an adult aspie, whenever people tell me how to do something socially. They rarely break it down enough so I learned to sit back and think deeply about it and break it down in my head.