Recreation and leisure activates key component

Recreation and leisure activities are key components of community participation, but daily living skills such as cooking, hygiene, travel/mobility, money management and health care are also necessary for successful everyday functioning.

In my classroom we work on a functional life skills curriculum. This means that every lesson incorporates some form of necessary life skill for everyday living. For instance, if I want to teach my students math we may set up an area of the classroom like a grocery store. My students will be given fake money (it looks very similar to real money), they will find items from a picture/word list, and then purchase said items. They need to make sure that they have enough money to purchase the items on the list. He students love this lesson because it seems more like a game. Another math lesson I do is incorporated into cooking instruction. One day we made tacos. The students needed to count all of the shells to make sure there were at least two per student. Then, they needed to measure and/or weigh all of the ingredients. After making the meat mixture, they needed to properly divide it among all of the taco shells.

There are many ways of incorporating functional life skills into academic lesson plans. I believe that all of the skills worked on in the classroom are only effective if they are reinforced at home.