How does a child learn what he needs to purchase for the following?
- Food
- School Supplies
- Clothing
- General Supplies
Shopping is more than a leisure activity. A child needs to learn to buy more than the latest video game, a book or cool athletic wear. It sounds so simple but learning how to shop requires a child knowing what he needs and when it should be purchased. He needs to figure out where to make these purchases and how to access transportation to and from the store. Does there need to be a list? How is price comparison taught?
This seems complicated! That's because life skills like shopping require many small steps chained together. It requires a lot of executive functioning skills. Skills like organizing and planning are necessary. A person needs to figure out what will be needed and how long it will take to find the items. What if things don't go according to plan. Is there margins to deal with some extra steps needed when things don't go according to plan.
These executive function skills are the real issue. Learning to shop is just a practical application of how to generalize the executive functioning skills. Let's pull apart the component parts of executive functioning before tackling shopping and becoming independent with it. There is a great tool by Michelle Garcia Winner that was designed to help children apply executive functioning to homework completion. Next week I will begin with the steps of this program to help with the task of shopping.
Please come back and join the discussion.
Posted with Blogsy