Wake Up for Teens: Independent Living Skills, Part 1 of 5
This series of articles and the educational lessons they contain will provide teens a look at the independent living skills they need to survive and thrive. They’ll learn a number of skills, develop a better understanding of adult life, and they’ll locate and learn to use a variety of valuable resources.
Visit my BLOG for the rest of the Activities in this Series.
While few young people have any direct personal experience of managing an independent lifestyle, some don’t even know what it looks like or that it’s even possible, because their parents and their families haven’t succeeded in the world, so those teens have never had this modeled for them. So these lessons will give them a chance to see, perhaps for the first time, what a productive and successful adult looks like.
In this first activity, youth will learn key terms and concepts, and get familiar with independent living skills and how the activities work. The key resource for this section and the rest of the activities is the Reality Road Map, which provides a visual layout of the key message and the primary goal of the learning experience: to make the connections between education, career, income, and lifestyle.
The activities act like a life simulation, where the student will discover that their level of education will determine what jobs they can quality for, which determines how much they’ll earn, which determines what they can reasonably afford in life. It’s much better to make mistakes and experiment in the simulation than to fail on the street and have to suffer those consequences.
The Reality Road Map shows educational, career, and financial paths in colored circles, that correspond to blue collar, white collar, green for advanced careers, and on the other end of the spectrum, red as a warning for dropping out. Most of the answers needed for the activity are found on the Road Map.