Our New Life Skills Center

As I continue to blog about my classroom I plan to introduce different 'centers' or activities that our students participate in during a typical school day. Today, we actually began a new adventure into the world of Life Skills/Activities of Daily Living (ADL's).  I have taught certain ADLs in my classroom in the past, but I have never had an entire center dedicated to them.  I got this idea and many of the resources from a teacher named Alyssa Zimini.  I found her resource on teachers pay teachers (https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Life-Skills-Centers-Year-Long-Life-Skills-Bundle-2284836) , and my wheels started turning! How, awesome would it be for my students if we were able to help them become more independent in areas they have never experienced before! I spent some time over the weekend prepping materials and rearranging our classroom in order to set up our new life skills center area. The area in our classroom with the sink and microwave was a perfect place to practice life skills, so I cleared out the art supplies that were previously stored there, and oh boy was that a task! 

All of these supplies have found a new home in the closet behind my desk!

Now we have space for our new life skills center!

The Life Skills Center Set Up

The skill we are working on this month is matching socks.  Once students are independent in this skill it is my hope that this can become a way for them to help out at home. 

This Month's Skill 

If you have ever spent time in a special education classroom you know the magic words are DATA DATA DATA.  Each time the students come to the center we will take data on the level of prompts required to complete each step of the task.  By the end of the month my goal is to have each student complete each step independently! In order for this to happen we need to make sure that we are fading our prompts as quickly as possible, and also that we are providing the least restrictive prompt possible. For example, we will first gesture to a student or verbally give them direction before we physically prompt or provide hand over hand assistance. 

Sample Data Sheet

 Each life skill we teach has picture prompts to help students visually see the step that comes next. We are skill working out the kinks on the best placement of these prompts, but for now they are attached to a paint stick with velcro, this way they can be moved around if we need the student to move to a new location.  After the students complete each step they remove the picture of that step from the stick and place it in the 'all done' bin. 

Task Analysis Picture Prompts

All Done Bucket

Here is a break down of how our students will complete the sock matching task. After they have gotten the bin and laid out each of the socks they will match the pairs.  

Match Socks into Pairs

Next comes the hard part... rolling the socks.  Shout out to our AWESOME Occupational Therapist Angie Miller for sharing this technique with me.  Here are the steps we are using to help our students roll socks:

Put one sock on the non-dominant hand

Pick up the matching sock and place it in the hand that is covered by the other sock

Now grab the other sock in your hand and hold tight 

Take your free hand and pull the bottom sock up and over the sock you are holding 

THEN....

Voila! You have a perfectly folded pair of socks!

Repeat until all of the socks are neatly rolled into pairs. 

Students then put the lid on the bin, put the bin away, and then they are all finished!

We had a lot of success with this skill today and I am excited to try again tomorrow!

I look forward to watching my students progress and can't wait for all of the new independent skills they are going to learn this year! :) 

If you have any questions about how we teach this skill or collect our data just let me know. 

Check back next month to see our February Life Skill :)