Daily living skills are the routine self-care activities that people engage in that promote independence. These skills span from toilet training to food preparation but generally help people maintain a level of health and safety.
Daily living skills are each set of multiple skills that are strung together. For instance, think about hand washing. Consider all of the smaller component skills that a person has to do to perform the larger task of hand washing: turning on the sink, pumping soap, tolerating getting wet, understanding clean versus dirty.
In order to teach a self help skill, it is important to first understand all the smaller component skills that makeup the larger skill. This is also called a task analysis. To create a task analysis, write down all the steps in order that make up a complex skill. It is important to be specific. A good way to test a task analysis is to read another person the written steps and see if they perform the skill correctly. For example, below is a task analysis of hand washing:
Once the task analysis is set, it is important to do a simple assessment of what the student may already be able to do. If the student is asked to wash their hands, what do they do? This will inform how to teach the skill. For instance, if a student can already pump the soap, the instructor can provide less prompting on that step.
When a task analysis is being taught, the teacher should provide as much prompting as is necessary for the student to successfully complete the task. It is important that the student does not make any mistakes or errors during the process, but rather that they learn by practicing the correct steps in the correct sequence. The teacher can facilitate prompting by standing behind the child and prompting their arms and hands only as much is needed for them to perform the task successfully. Then, follow through all the steps of the task analysis until the skill is complete. It is important to teach the same sequence of steps each time. Each step is a cue for the next step. For example, you only begin brushing your teeth once you have toothpaste on your toothbrush. It is important to teach the steps in the order they are written so the student does not get confused.
Task analyses are also called behavior chains because they are many smaller component behaviors that are strung together to perform a longer chain. There are two ways to teach task analyses- forward and backward chaining.
There are some common mistakes that people make when attempting to teach self help skills to students. These mistakes are relying too heavily on verbal cueing or picture supports. While these are helpful in supplementing teaching, they are often not enough to teach the skill to independence. Instead, these skills are best taught using physical prompting, or physically guiding the student to complete the desired response. Those prompts are then lessened over time as the student becomes more independent.
When teaching daily living skills it is important to remember to state the direction in the beginning. For instance, tell the student “wash your hands” before they begin the task but then minimize the amount of verbal directions provided throughout teaching. Students can become very dependent on verbal instructions and they are difficult to remove once teaching is complete.
When teaching a new skill, it is important to make sure everyone is teaching the skill to the student in the same way. For instance, if the student is learning to wash their hands using hand soap with a pump then the student should not be exposed to hand washing with a bar of soap. Once the skill is mastered, it can then be generalized to different scenarios such as different types of soap.
Daily Living Skills are essential for living an independent and productive life. The more a child can do for themselves, the better off they will be in the future. It is important to practice these skills as many times throughout the day as possible and in as many different environments to ensure students can perform the skill when they are faced with it in the real world.
Contributor Bio
Shea Kytomaa has her Master’s in Education from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Autism and Developmental Disabilities. She is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and has worked in K-12 schools, clinics, and community mental health centers. Shea currently serves as a Classroom Consultant at TeachTown and is passionate about bringing their K-12 adapted core curriculum into special education classrooms