Assessing and Teaching Independent Living Skills in Episode 107 of Transition Tuesday

Описание: If you’d like to receive our Episode 107 bonus resources on assessing and teaching independent living skills, click this link http://tensigma.org/episode107bonus

This quote by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) explains why continually assessing and teaching independent living skills for transition-age students are so valuable, “Education that helps young people develop (life skills) has transformative potential.”

What are independent living skills? Independent living skills are the skills that a person needs on a daily basis to live independently.
Within the concept of living skills there are major areas of focus.
They include the following:

● Self-Management Skills
Personal skills: eating, grooming, hygiene
Functional Communication skills: expressing/communicating wants and needs

● Home Management Skills
Kitchen and cooking skills: planning meals, heating food, setting the table
Shopping and cleaning skills

● Health and Safety Skills
Keeping safe skills such as: safely uses equipment and appliances, medication management, and appropriate boundaries.
Relationships/sexuality skills such as: having a basic understanding of relationships, friends, and sexuality.

Relevant teaching strategies after assessing for life skills include:
● Forward chaining -breaking up a task into small steps and teaching the first step and then the second step and so forth.
● Backward chaining -teaching the last step first, then the second to the last step, etc.
● Repetition -one of the best ways to reinforce and learn a task.
● Shaping -shaping is used in the earlier stages of learning and is when the student is rewarded when they are approximately able to do the task
● Grading -giving a simple task to start with and slowly increasing the complexity.
● *Adaptations –changes to the environment, technique, or equipment in order to learn independent living skills and increase independence.

Other Activities/Strategies
● Modeling and role-playing tasks
● Field trips/community outings
● Social Narratives/Stories
● Picture-sequence
● Hand-over-hand assistance

As part of each episode of Transition Tuesday, we provide additional tips, teacher tools, and resources related to the topics we cover. For this week’s bonus, we are providing a PDF with great resources on assessing and teaching independent living skills, which can be accessed by clicking this link - http://tensigma.org/episode107bonus

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We hope you enjoyed this episode and that the information about assessing and teaching independent living skills.