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Skill Training 4: Places to Start

Selecting jobs to train:

• Start with major jobs groups that can be applied to many arenas:

Picking up and putting away in proper receptacles clutter (toys and clothes expand to magazines and shoes in the living room and, eventually, textbooks and paper supplies on the work desk). Sweeping un-carpeted floors with tiny brooms expands to bathroom and kitchen floors, basement areas and porches and decks. Cleaning a bathroom sink moves into the kitchen. Dusting floorboard molding moves in time to floor lamps, lower shelves, bookcases, and knick-knacks.

• Start with tasks that need daily (twice daily, in the case of picking up toys) and weekly attention, growing out to less frequent tasks.
• Select tasks that start with personal responsibility for their own sphere of life: their own bodies (food and cleanliness), their own clothing, their own living equipment (beds, chairs, tables, etc.) and their own possessions (books, toys, outdoor equipment, musical instruments).
• Once a cleaning module has grown into a component of several smaller modules (the individual modules of making the bed, putting away toys, and hanging up clothes have all been combined into the task of “cleaning the bedroom,” for example), keep awkward, time consuming jobs as separate, special event tasks (reorganizing the dresser drawers, cleaning the bathtub, straightening junk drawers).

Skill Training 3: Transfer to Automation

Transfer to Automation

The breakdown in most therapies, and school-room education is transferring what was (supposedly) learned into normal, daily living or into other environments than the learning setting (picture someone making their bed or helping to set the table at grandma’s or a friend’s house, rather than at home). It’s a little like you being able to take the steps to working yourself out of a job and applying them in new ways: can you take them and use them in other home areas or workplace? in areas you need to train yourself? Or are these steps forever tied to a package of working with young children and you can’t imagine any other context for them to be applicable or helpful? Read more

Skill Training 2: Comprehensive Training

Comprehensive Training

1. Schedule training sessions. Shorter, more frequent times are better than one marathon session, especially with kids. Do not just decide one day you are tired of making six beds and it’s high time everyone started to make their own, from the 8 month old to the ten year old.
2. Demonstrate. Demonstrate the job (or part of the job) to your apprentices. Show where to get supplies and equipment. Show them how to clean-up when finished.
3. Explain. Explain how you expect the job to be done in kid-friendly terms. Incorporate the hints and expectations you compiled. You can devise non-reader charts of pictures to show what to do (cut out magazine pictures of a toilet and circle the outside of the bowl you want them to clean while you do the tank, seat, and inside the bowl, for example). Readers can get their own list you prepare for them. Read more

Skill Training 1: Professional Preparation

“Put them away.” Big hand on little hand lifting toys block by block, into a small bin. “Put them away.” Another block into the bin. “Put them away.” If there are 6000 toys on the floor and you and your one-year-old apprentice put every one away with the same behavior sequence, what do you think, your apprentice will do when he or she hears, “Put them away?” Read more