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Why Job Skills Activities for High School Students?
As an educator in a special education setting, job skills activities are a main focus in my classroom. Once I have an idea of post secondary goals for each student, my planning and prep work turn to teaching and building life and job skills.
Ultimately, I want my students to be as ready as they can be for their post secondary settings.
Finding engaging and effective job skills activities, as well as setting them up and implementing them, can be a barrier.
In my early years of special education, I was having a hard enough time keeping up with the various aspects of the day. Learning about the students, figuring out the program, etc. This made it that much more difficult to learn about job skills activities. Not to mention how to implement them in the classroom.
This blog post is the first in a series of job skills activities I will be sharing with you. My goal here is to support all special educators and parents with what I have learned along the way.
I don’t know everything, but what I do know, I want to share so you can support your students too.
How to Choose Job Skills Activities for your Classroom
We have spent some time talking so far about choosing and writing IEP goals for students. If you missed those posts, click on the links to check them out!
Once you know what IEP goals your students are focusing on for the semester, you can do a few things to use that in planning job skills activities.
Step 1
First, you need to have a look at the goals of each student and compare them. By this I mean, how many students do you have working on similar goals? I have had situations where I have the majority of my students focusing on a similar goal. In this case, you can plan something for that group to work on.
Even if the ability levels are different, choose one whole class activity that addresses the goal. From there, individualizing it for each student is the best way to go. This allows you to plan one job skill activity instead of running multiple activities at the same time.
This is not to say you shouldn’t have multiple job skill activities happening at the same time. I would typically have 2 or 3 different job skills activities running in one semester. It would just be not all at the same time or during the same period.
Step 2
Second, consider the goal that your students are working on. What skills do students need to work on that goal? This could be communication, social skills, money skills, functional skills, life skills. There are so many different skills and they often overlap.
I would typically choose one of these skills that is consistent among my students and focus on that for the job skills activity. The other skills will definitely be addressed, but these might be more individual to the student.
Step 3
Third, now that you have a goal in mind, think about the students you have and what their interests are. Are there common interests among your students? Do you have a group who likes to walk and move? Do your students like music and art? Is yours a group who enjoys being in the kitchen?
It is entirely possible that you have students who like all of these things. If you are only going to start with one job skill activity, however, try to make it one that all or most of your students will enjoy.
Now that you have chosen an area or topic for your activity, it is time to get planning and prepping!
Job Skills Activities On or Off Campus?
Depending on the needs of your students, it is important to decide if you are going to plan activities that will happen at school or in the community. Ideally, you would want a mix of both. If you and your students are new to job skills activities, then starting with in school activities is the way to go.
I would also add excursions with your class to get students ready to participate in activities off campus. This can be as simple as going to a local coffee shop and ordering a snack.
There are so many skills that can be addressed in that one excursion. This includes money skills (using a debit card, calculating totals and change), transit skills, community signs and safety, social and conversation skills, etc.
For the first activity in this Job Skills Activity series, I will focus on delivery jobs. This is one that I have used successfully with my students.
In School Delivery Job
There are many different skills involved in making deliveries for students working on IEP goals.
First, students are learning to locate a delivery spot and place the correct item in the correct spot.
Second, students who are delivering items directly to the person receiving it are using communication and social skills.
Third, there are literacy skills involved in reading the item, determining where it needs to go, and reading the mailbox or room number that the delivery is going to.
Last, students are incorporating movement and physical activity into their day.
Setting up the Delivery Job Skills Activity
There are several ways that I have done the delivery job with students. This has involved various levels of interaction within the school community.
The nice thing about this is that it allows you to have the same job skills activity (deliveries) with different levels. This means students of various abilities in your classroom can participate.
Level 1
As an introduction to the activity, and for students who are just starting to incorporate job skills activities, I would start with the basic idea of taking an item and delivering it to the correct location.
For this I choose one hallway in the school (usually the hallway closest to the classroom) and tape file folders to the wall just outside the door near the classroom number.
You could use plastic file folder holders and have them more permanently attached to the wall, but if you are trying to keep costs down, using a file folder is the easiest and most cost effective.
On each file folder I write the classroom number or whatever other identifying name you want to use for the delivery. This could also be the teacher’s name or the subject area.
I then take a stack of blank envelopes and add a blank sheet of paper or two to each. This adds weight to the envelopes and makes the activity more realistic.
Write the identifying name or classroom number on the outside of the envelope. I would only write one thing on the envelope at this point.
Now that you have the envelopes and file folders set up, you give each student a stack of envelopes to deliver and have them go make their deliveries.
Once finished, you would go back later and get the envelopes so that students can do the deliveries again another day.
Level 2
Once students are familiar with the concept of making deliveries, you can increase the requirements of the activity in a few ways.
- Add additional information to the envelope (like name, address, location, etc.). Teach students to locate the information needed to make the delivery. I would start by highlighting the info on the envelope so students learn to identify it. Then create ones that don’t have the highlight.
- Increase the number of hallways and rooms that students are delivering to.
- Add different coloured folders and have students match deliveries based on colour and identifying info.
- Have students complete a delivery checklist where they check off each delivery that has been completed.
Level 3
In this level I would add a social component to the delivery. This requires that you work out a system with a few teachers in those classrooms so that students have to knock on the door and give the envelope to the teacher directly.
There are almost always teachers who are willing to participate in this with your students. Teachers then either put the envelope in the file folder outside the door after the student leaves, or put it in your mailbox in the teacher workroom.
The benefit here is that you are including a social skill and conversation component within your activity.
For this level, especially when students are starting out, I would have a social script or conversation card ready for them so that they know what to say to the teacher. If students are able to start and continue conversations then you can skip the social prompt cards.
Level 4
In this step, students will deliver packages and envelopes. You can gather empty boxes and wrap them, as well as have different sized envelopes with different fonts and types of information on the front.
Have a delivery list for students indicating which package goes to which room. You can increase the level as well by asking students to get the person receiving the package to sign for it.
Here is a free sample delivery form to use with your students!
Teaching Job Skills Activities to Students
I always start a new activity with students by allowing them to explore the materials before we do anything with them. From there, I will spend some time doing direct teaching.
This could include a whole group lesson using slides to demonstrate the different steps (depending on the level of the students in your classroom).
The next part of the direct teaching would be to do a set of deliveries (regardless of the starting level) with the whole group.
If I have groups of students at different levels, I would do this with each level separately so that they are not confused by what other students are doing versus what they should do.
If there are students who require prompts, I would have them do the delivery after the whole group lesson with verbal prompts from a teacher or support staff. I would pair this verbal prompt with a sequence of task steps. These can be written, with images, or both.
Once the student is comfortable with the routine of the delivery, I would reduce the verbal prompts and move to visual prompts (i.e. pointing at the step on the visual task sequence card instead of telling the student what to do).
The goal is for the student to be able to complete the delivery completely independently. This could include using the task sequence cards as a reminder, or maybe moving to a checklist.
Once the student has mastered whichever level of deliveries they are working on, I would repeat this direct teaching and reduction of prompt sequence for the next level.
Next Steps
Once you have set up and incorporated this delivery job skill activity into your classroom and daily or weekly routine, you will be ready to move to the next job skill activity in our series.
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Thanks so much for staying with me through this post. I would love to hear how this job skill delivery activity is working for you in your classroom. Tag me on Instagram or Facebook letting me know how it goes!
I would love for you to send me an email if you have any requests for future topics, or ideas for resources you would love to see.
You can also check out the special education resources I have available in my TPT, Etsy, or TeachShare shop.
Looking forward to hearing from you!!