Life Skills Lesson Plans
Sometimes the most important things teachers can teach their students are life skills.
By Stephanie Marks
Teaching students content is very important, but I often found that teaching students enduring life skills was just as important. One way I do this is to teach organizational skills. Throughout the year I help my students organize their notes by keeping a copy of a classroom notebook. It holds all of the dittoes that I use, as well as a list of the objectives and drills by date so that if a student was absent he/she could immediately check to see what he/she had missed. The student was responsible for checking the notebook upon returning to class, and I would do frequent checks of the students' notes to ensure that they were keeping up with the class work. The grades would count as quizzes, and this helped them to know that I was serious about how important their notebooks were.
Another life lesson that I incorporated into my lessons were study skills. Before I knew that there was a program called AVID, I would work with my students on how to take notes for all of their classes. I would teach them various note taking strategies from abbreviations to webs to shorthand so that hopefully they would each find something that would work for them. I also helped students by color-coding items and showing them how to use highlighters or colored pencils in their own notes. I tried to address a variety of learning styles in the classes so that students would transfer these strategies to their other classes.
A third life lesson that I tried to incorporate into my lessons was fairness. I had a poster hanging in my classroom that said "Fairness is not everyone getting the same thing; fairness is everyone getting what he or she deserves." I talked to my students about how certain people need certain things and that equal does not always mean fair. Some students understood it and some did not, but they all respected my decisions because I always said what I meant and meant what I said. That was the fourth life lesson that I taught them, and that, along with the third, was perhaps the most important of all. What follows are more lesson ideas to teach students about life skills.
Life Skills Lesson Plans:
Students in high school have to examine their various roles in life: personal, school, community, and work. They then strive to determine if they have a balance and carry out the balance in their everyday lives. Finally, they then track their own progress towards the goal that they set for achieving the balance in their lives.
Students take a survey on their own study habits and discuss what they do on their own and then learn about various types of study habits. The teacher guides them through tips on note-taking, test-taking strategies, and textbook reading strategies. This helps students to prepare to become better independent learners.
This lesson is designed for use with students with special needs, but could be adapted for use with any student. It is broken down into five activities and has students learn how to use digital cameras to communicate their needs in a variety of settings from the school house to the community and culminates with students demonstrating their abilities at an IEP meeting.