Meaningful Homework for Students In Life Skills (Special Education)
Dec 15, 2021
It never fails, one family each year on my caseload requests that I send homework for their student to practice after school and on the weekends. I completely agree when families ask for ways for their students to practice the skills they have learned in school at home.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t focused on the right life skill tasks for a long time. While I used to see this as another task to prepare, give, and check, I recently figured out how to work smarter not harder!
I decided to create a Homework Sheet with meaningful ways the student can reinforce what is learned in the home setting while still having a level of choice and variety. Also, no matter where the student is at (at home, at the grandparents for the weekend, or on vacation) they could still be using their newly learned skills to both strengthen and generalize.
As a TeachersPayTeacher author, when I can’t find what I want or need, I just create it!
While I was creating I kept these goals top of mind:
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1 page
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Enough activities to last a week
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Consistent format and expectation from week to week so there was little to no new information for families to review with the student
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Level of student choice
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Easy to record and return (if families wanted to, but not required)
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Age appropriate for high school/transition age students in special education life skill classes
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Relevant to what we was being covered in class or for the week
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37 topics, enough for 1 homework sheet per week for a full school year
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MEANINGFUL!
(You can also find these homework sheets as part of the Life Skill Lesson Units)
Here is how they work…
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Student picks one skill to work on from the list of 5.
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They execute the task
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Someone observes them (sibling, parent, relative, etc)
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That someone then writes the number, date, and their initials on the bottom slip
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Student repeats this 4 more times (they can do the same number 5 times or switch it up and do 2 or 3 or all 5 tasks)
If you are looking for meaningful homework for your middle school, high school, or transition age students in life skills, then consider grabbing this Homework Packet or check out the Life Skills Lesson Units for the full, comprehensive lesson materials.
