Life skills for young learners-The What, Why & When ?
Life Skills: What?
Life skills are the positive and adaptive skills we need to deal effectively with the challenges in everyday life. Children learn these essential life skills from their environment. Parents, family, and teachers play a crucial role in shaping their behavior.
As per Future of Jobs Report 2020 by World Economic Forum, top 5 emerging skills identified high in demand within organizations, ordered by frequency are:
- Critical Thinking and Analysis
- Complex Problem Solving
- Creativity , originality and initiative
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
Life Skills: Why?
Life skills help children build healthy relationships with self and others, think creatively, communicate effectively, empathize, and manage emotions and live their lives in a healthy and productive manner.
The United Nations Inter-Agency Meeting had concluded “In addition to its wide-ranging applications in primary prevention and the advantages that it can bring for education systems, life skills education lays the foundation for learning skills that are in great demand in today’s job markets”
Life Skills. When?
For the Pre-schoolers:
Imparting social skills starts young. Age group of 3-6 years has been recognized globally as the crucial stage for development of mental faculties of a child. Teaching kids to say “Please” and “Thank You” help them to learn gratitude and patience learning to share their toys and take turns teaches them self-control and caring about others.
For the Young Learners and the pre-teens -Ages 6 to 12
At this age, kids need to learn how to listen to other people’s perspectives, to be able to give suggestions without being bossy and not bullying others. These skills help them to get along with others and build a foundation of being a good leader. At this age, they need to learn how to start making friends on their own; going up to other kids, talk to them and include them in their circle of friends, show empathy and interest in other kids.
As parents, teaching them these skills isn’t simply telling them to ‘do’ a particular thing in a particular way. Best way is to be role model these skills for better adoption in kids. Of course it will help to guide them in situations where they need a little nudge or taking the help of an expert.
When kids are learning to go up to people, talk about themselves and making friends, these learnings are going to help them all along the way.
For the Teens
Social communication is a major part of their life at this age. It includes interactions on social media for the most. They need to learn how to use this media appropriately without hurting themselves, or other people.
Personal effectiveness in their activities along with social skills helps them to set appropriate goals and to take effective action to actualize these goals. This really boosts their self-confidence.
This is the age when they can begin to learn how to make a really good first and lasting impression on people. Elements of image management like appropriate appearance, behavior including etiquette, communication including body language are the skills that can be worked upon for a winning impression. Being able to make polite conversations and build interpersonal relationships would help them a great deal in their life.
Conclusion:
Development of life skills should be an essential part of an effective education system. Education should help build capacity of children to live in a multi-faceted world as an active and engaged citizen. To cope with the increasing pace and change of modern life, young learners also need new life skills such as the ability to deal with stress and frustration. Classbuk.com provides a global platform for expert teachers to share their knowledge with young learners across wide variety of topics and help learners actively develop higher-order skills that they can apply in a real-world context. WEF report on Future of Jobs 2020 states “Developing and enhancing human skills and capabilities through education, learning and meaningful work are key drivers of economic success, of individual well-being and societal cohesion”
Clearly, the decisions and choices we as parents make today will determine the course of our children’s lives and livelihoods.
Miss Trupti
Image and Life Skills Educator.
Writer and Teacher at Classbuk.com