Ideas for Life Skills Classroom Task Training
Life skills lessons in the classroom are a valuable opportunity to equip young people with the practical know-how they'll need to get the best out of life. Life skills cover a wide variety of activities, from preparing for work life to interacting within a community. Using a task format to teach life skills is particularly effective, since these are invariably practical rather than theoretical topics. Life skills tasks in the classroom can be casual or more involved depending on the topics covered.
-
Money and Debt
-
Making decisions about spending, borrowing or managing a budget are tasks that everyone faces, and can have serious consequences if you make an uninformed choice. Children benefit significantly from exploring these types of decisions in the classroom. Create a scenario in which students have to make a choice about how to finance a purchase, and perhaps work out the real costs involved in different credit options, calculating the impact of interest rates over time.
Work and Career
-
Work life is an ideal topic for life skills, and can be explored in various ways. Having students fill out mock job application forms and write speculative letters to employers are ways to expose them to tasks that they will have to carry out themselves at some stage. Mock job interviews are also an option, with some students taking part on the interview panel, others being interviewed for a post. Work skills can also cover interacting with fellow employees and working as part of a team to carry out some task to completion.
-
Conflict
-
Conflict resolution is a key life skill, and the foundation for it can be built through role-play activities. Resolving arguments between people is a good way to start building communication and diplomatic skills. Experiment with scenarios involving aggression or personal safety within a role-playing activity. For example, practice what students can do when they find themselves in a potentially dangerous situation. Tackling bigotry or racism during role play can also be effective.
Home and Domestic Life
-
Explore domestic life from a number of angles, such as managing a home, making decisions about budgets and bills, and dealing with home emergencies. Create a scenario in which students are moving home as a good way to cover all aspects of having your own home, from setting up utilities to keeping the home safe and secure. Cover also the basics on taxes and other obligatory elements of citizenship.
Health
-
Personal, family and community health can be a useful element in life skills training. Public health is often an effective way to encourage students to think in terms of their communities, and can be included in work and domestic role-playing scenarios. Cover what to do if a student has a health problem themselves as well as more complex tasks to explore the health implications of working life or perhaps industrial and environmental issues.
-
References
Resources
- Photo Credit A High-School Graduate image by TMLP from Fotolia.com
