SECTION 3 Teaching and learning Life Skills What is Life Skills?


Life Skills deals with the holistic development of the learner throughout childhood. It equips learners with knowledge, skills and values that assist them to achieve their full physical, intellectual, personal, emotional and social potential. The subject encourages learners to acquire and practise life skills that will assist them to become independent and effective in responding to life’s challenges and to play an active and responsible role in society. The subject aims to develop learners through three different, but interrelated study areas, that is, Personal and Social Well-being, Physical Education and Creative Arts.


Teaching Personal and Social Well-being


There is a wide range of material for you to cover during the Intermediate Phase, all aimed at helping learners to become confident, responsible and caring members of society. There is a range of activities throughout the Learner’s Book with guidelines and answers in the Teacher’s Guide. We strongly advise that learners do all the activities since this is a very important way for them to engage with the material. To keep the information on all the topics current, look out for newspaper articles or items on TV news that relate to the Life Skills course (there will always be several items!) and discuss these with learners in your next class. Encourage learners to share this information too.


Here are some tips for teaching the different topics:


Topic 1: Development of the self You begin each year with this topic. Your aim should be to help learners to realise their potential in life, to grow in confidence and to learn how to deal with challenges in their lives such as conflict, relationships, bullying and peer pressure. Not all learners will react to these issues in the same way. You will have to decide how to manage the class for discussions. You may feel that sometimes it would be better to divide the class into only boy and only girl groups for some discussions such as dealing with changes during puberty. At other times you could just have pairs working together. It is very important that you encourage learners to discuss and compare experiences since this is a way of helping them through a period in their lives when they often feel they are the only one going through these changes. Many learners bottle up bad experiences they may have had as a result of conflict or peer pressure or bad relationships. Bringing these issues out in the open can be a painful reminder for these learners. Always make it clear that you are available if any learners want to discuss something in private. You can then either deal with the matter yourself or refer the learner to someone who can help them. Hopefully you can build up trust between you and your Life Skills class which will develop as the year progresses. This will make it easier for learners to discuss issues in an open way with you and their peers.


Section 3: Teaching and learning Life Skills 31


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