Daily living skills

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Daily living skills are the basic skills that one needs to move through their daily routine.

[edit] Overview

Daily living skills include, but are not limited to, using the toilet, bathing oneself, brushing teeth, shaving, managing menstrual care, eating appropriately, washing clothes, using the telephone, preparing meals, and cleaning.

In an attempt to get more people with mental retardation out of institutional and residential settings, and into community settings it is important to teach these skills to everyone regardless of the severity of their disability. When teaching students with disabilities daily living skills the main goal is to move the individual towards independence. When determining which skills are needed one should start off with an assessment tool such as an ecological assessment. A commonly used assessment is the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale.

After determining what skills the student possesses one must then determine which skills the student will benefit most from. From there one must find the best way to teach these skills. One effective way to teach daily living skills is to use a task analysis. A task analysis takes a skill such as hand-washing and breaks it down into its simplest parts. This makes it much easier for the student to learn the needed task.

Something that one must keep in mind when teaching students with mental retardation is generalization. Generalization refers to applying a learned skill in different environments in which it was learned. For example, if one wants to teach a student how to use public transportation the best environment for that would be on a bus or in a taxi as apposed to setting up a fake bus in the classroom. Students with mental retardation have a difficult time with generalization, so if they were to learn how to ride a bus inside of the classroom with a cardboard box they would not be able to go into the public and ride a real bus. Daily living skills are crucial for these students' independence and need to be taught.