Creating a Life Skills Portfolio for Special Education Students

Video Transcript

"Did you have different portfolios along with like every child has, a writing portfolio and things like that but we I keep anecdotal records and things and for some kids who social skills are a struggle for them then we do have a portfolio like any child with autism or just a lack of social skills will write social stories and we kind of keep things of this is why it's not good to hit my friend. And we'll keep that kind of stuff and we'll reference that but they don't really have like a life skills portfolio that follows them, it's more like an academic here's a display of my work. My kids love going through their folders and oh look what I did three months ago, I can do that way better now. And they love seeing the stories and we do a lot of things with pictures and some of my kids that just cannot get the rules like with their behavior management system, we'll take a picture, here's a picture of you sitting quietly raising your hand. This is what your body needs to look like. And then when they're being disruptive and yelling out I'll just kind of pull out that picture and say does your body look like this? And then they say oh no it's definitely not. Because a lot of kids learn in different ways and some of them are visual and some of the are auditory and so you just kind of have to find that way that meets their need and then once you've got it then you play towards that teaching method. We do a lot of role play. In situations like conflict resolution and a lot of that happens naturally but we also do create situations where they have to work through it so we'll have one little kid come up and rip something from his hand and then that kid has to role play out what is the appropriate response. We do a lot of whenever I'm teaching math I try to relate it to a real life situation, OK why are we doing things with money? Why do we have to learn how to subtract? My kids hate subtracting. Might say well if you're going to go to the store with a 20 dollar bill and you're going to buy something you need to make sure you get the right change or else you're going to get cheated and as soon as they make that real life connection, oh they get it and it's much more meaningful and so we're always trying to tie things to real life."