Weekly Content Update | Life Skills
This week's article explores Life Skills clips we uploaded earlier this year to teach chores, cooking, dressing for the weather and interacting with fasteners. We will learn how to use this content with other clips from the Gemiini library to create assignments that promote independence and self-confidence.
Chores
Participating in household chores can help students become more independent in activities of daily living. Our chores clips are excellent models for students learning how to do simple chores. These clips use simplified step-by-step instructions to teach chores like sweeping the floor, picking up toys, feeding pets, and putting dishes into the dishwasher. The simplified language and clear visuals make these clips accessible to students with low or high verbal skills.
Chores clips are located in Skills → Life Skills → Chores. One way to build an effect session around chores clips is to add clips from the full library for the items and actions referenced in clip of the chore you are teaching. For example, if I am building a session around the clip for how to do the dishes, I would add clips to the playlist for the words "kitchen", "sink", "dishwasher", "plate", and "cup". I would also add generalizations for any action words used in the instructions, such as "stack", "carry", "rinse" and "put in". Expanding the session this way creates a lesson that generalizes vocabulary and teaches categorization and sequencing in addition to the new life skill.
Cooking
Our cooking clips use a format similar to the chores clips to teach how to prepare snacks and promote a healthy diet. In each clip, a child models how to prepare a simple healthy snack like a fruit plate or cheese and crackers. Each basic step in preparing the snack is shown clearly and paired with a voiceover of a simple instruction.
The objective of the cooking clips is to teach the sequence of actions involved in completing a food preparation task, and they can be used in sessions for students with low or high verbal skills. As with the chores clips, using cooking clips with clips that teach the words and actions shown is great way to build an effective custom session. Cooking clips are located in Skills → Life Skills → Cooking.
Interacting with Fasteners
As students become more independent in interactions with common objects, their self-confidence will grow and the amount of frustration they feel during day-to-day activities will lessen. This is why we created our Zippers, Fasteners, Knots category. This category contains image generalizations for common fasteners as well as close-up action generalizations to show how to interact with these objects. These clips zoom in on the action to model the motor skills involved in twisting off a lid, buttoning clothing, buckling a seatbelt, and many other actions. I'd also like to highlight the Simple Directions clips in this category, which combine fluid visuals and clear verbal prompts to model each step in zipping up a jacket and tying shoes.
A great way to incorporate these clips into a custom assignment is to combine image generalizations teaching the names of common fasteners with the action generalizations that model how to interact with those objects. These clips are recommended for students who are placed in Level 3 or higher of the Language Pyramid. They are located in Skills → Life Skills → Zippers, Fasteners, Knots.
Dressed for the Weather
Learning to choose appropriate clothing for different types of weather is another important piece of independent living. Earlier this summer we added clips to help teach this skill to Skills → Life Skills → Independent Living. Each of these clips teaches the different components of an outfit selected by the actor to go with the type of weather seen in the frame.
These clips can be used together with image generalizations teaching vocabulary for the weather and clothing items shown in the skits. To generalize the lesson from these clips, students can check the weather at home before putting together their own outfits. Learning to match an article of clothing with a type of weather is a great way to practice associative memory, which is important in developing receptive and expressive language skills.
If you'd like to use Gemiini to work on these skills with your student but don't want to build your own session from scratch, that's okay! Many of these clips appear in the Life Skills videos available in our QuickStart Skills library. QuickStart sessions can be assigned to your student at any time. These sessions can be viewed as they are, or you can customize them according your student's needs.
For help using this content or any clips from the Gemiini library in your student's assignments, schedule a call with one of our product specialists. If you're having technical trouble or need help getting started, check out the articles in our Knowledge Base. If you're looking for clips that don't exist on the site, please send a content request to videos@gemiini.org.