How to Teach Life Skills to Special Education Kids
Children with special needs should learn critical life skills as soon as possible. This is mostly because it will take them more time to learn the skills, but also because they need them more than anyone else. The more you can educate a special education child, the more you help to offset the disadvantage with which they were born. Following these simple step-by-step instructions, you can effectively teach life skills to a child with special needs.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
Teach Life Skills to Special Education Kids
-
1
Identify the most important life skills that the child needs to learn. Focus on things like getting dressed, brushing teeth, going to the bathroom, telling time and performing some sort of work. The level of skills you can teach your child depends a great deal on the severity of their disability.
-
2
Use a system of rewards and routine to teach the skill. With normal children you might be able to explain to them why they need to brush their teeth or do their homework. It will be extremely difficult to do so with a special education child, and you probably will not achieve much doing so.
-
-
3
Perform the skill with the child several times before you expect him to do it on his own. All children, and especially special needs children, require constant examples to learn. With repetition the child will start to learn the motions and eventually perform the skill independently.
-
4
Withdraw rewards when the child has made the skill a major part of her routine. Many special needs children like the sense of having a routine. In time you will not need to reinforce their behavior with a reward, and this is how things should be.
-
5
Do not yell at the child when she cannot perform the skill correctly. Negative reinforcement rarely works with special needs children because they do not understand why they need to perform the task. They will work toward earning a reward and pleasing you if you respect them.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
Take one small skill at a time. Show excitement and approval when the child learns the life skill.
Do not start a new task until others have been fully learned. Do not use negative reinforcement to teach a special needs child a life skill.
