When you reflect on your weekend or day off, you most likely think of your favorite leisure activities… things you naturally veer towards because you enjoy them. Our students need to build these same social and leisure skills. Like most skills, it doesn’t come naturally to our students. Read on for ideas on how and why you must intentionally build leisure skills.
Why Practice Leisure Skills?
- Leisure practice naturally builds in a work “break” for students. This perceived break will help students remain focused on learning.
- Leisure skills are an important part of adult life. Students need to be able to fill their down time appropriately.
- Leisure skills open the door for being included in life long social situations and friendships.
- Leisure skills are needed at every stage and setting of our students’ lives. For example school, home, day habilitation programs, community, vocational settings, online forums, social media. etc.
How To Build & Practice Leisure Skills
To start targeting leisure skills in your special educaiton classroom, pick a leisure or social skill that can be generalized widely. For example, instead of teaching students to collect stamps or read comic books, teach them to play a game. Why? Because playing games is appropriate for every developmental age.
Once students can play a game, it can easily be broadend to other game activities. For example, if you learn to play Zingo, you can then learn to play Memory. Both games involve concepts of same and different, taking turns, attending to the cards or pieces the other players pick. Both games need the same skills set.
Most games involve:
- Asking and answering questions
- Taking turns
- Strategy
- Winning & losing… and being able to handle both!
Ideas For Social & Leisure Skills At Different Ages
Here are ideas for leisure and social skills to practice at different levels.
Elementary school ideas:
- Boardgames
- Action figures and dolls
- Playdoh
- Motor games (ex: Tag, ball/net games, 4 Square, etc.)
- Legos and other building sets
Middle School ideas:
- Video games (ideally that involve more than one player)
- Bowling
- Skating (roller skating or ice skating depending on the time of the year)
- Dancing
- Listening and singing along to music
High School Ideas:
- Video Games (continue broadening the variety)
- Painting your nails done together
- Bike rides
- Takng a walk or going on a hike
- Yoga or dancing
All ages: BINGO, coloring, crafts, painting, puzzles, and Legos
Ideas For Hobbies and Leisure Skills That Grow With Students
Craft activities are great for all ages. In elementary classrooms, activities such as playing with Playdoh, painting with watercolors and making cards or pictures for others are age appropriate and support language and fine motor development.
In middle school, you can transition from Playdoh to using clay. This is also a great time to teach students different ways to make friendship bracelets. You can use beads, threads, etc. depending on your students’ fine motor skills. Then in high school, these leisure skills naturally pave the way for painting, scrapbooking and make oragami.
Building with Legos is also a fantastic leisure activity for students of all ages. Students can move from simply building and stacking blocks to following directions to complete more and more complicated structures or kits.
Be Mindful Of Age Appropriateness
It’s important that we expose and teach leisure skills that are age appropriate. When we fail to do this, students get stuck in early interests and can end up standing out as different. For example, playing with the Elmo doll when you are 17 will likely draw attention. It’s unlikely peers will try to include them in social events if they think it will draw negative attention their way.
Finally, leisure skills are one of the most needed skill in day habilitation programs. Students of all levels need to build leisure skills. Build this crucial life and social skill into your daily schedule.
Read more about social skills:
Resources For Practicing Leisure Skills:
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