Learn Beyond Classrooms
Why Are Life Skills Activities So Important In School Education?
Life skills are essential abilities that assist young people in coping with life's challenges and promoting overall well-being. Achieving these life skills education through introducing life skill activities requires people to acquire psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills that are critical to making informed decisions, solving problems, thinking critically and creatively, communicating effectively, empathising with others, and managing their lives in a healthy and productive way. In view of its importance as a period of growth and development, adolescence marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Physical and psychological traits undergo rapid development during this period. Young people are also greatly influenced by their peers and the outside world during adolescence, which is the stage when their relationships extend beyond their parents and families. We emphasise life skills activities as an integral part of the overall education system in order to help our students adapt to the changing demands of society.
Why life skills are important? The dictionary defines life skills for students as a set of mental and interpersonal abilities that support people in making informed decisions, resolving problems, thinking critically and creatively, communicating effectively, building healthy relationships, empathising with others, and managing their lives in a healthy and productive fashion. Children's development is closely linked to their activity for life skills and can help them later on in life. Learn how to incorporate these life skills education into your daily life and what your child should know. The challenges of the 21st-century job landscape require competencies like resilience, communication, proactivity, and leadership. However, it is not always clear how to teach these life skills. A significant challenge for us is to sustain young people's efforts while preparing them for the future that is unseen. Fortunately, it’s not complicated at all! The following are some of the significant life skills activities we emphasise in our school as the foundation for supporting our students' careers in the future.
- Inculcate the value and skill of collaboration
Developing life skills for students to their current and future jobs is imperative for young people. As a result, they'll be well prepared for collaboration, not only in the classroom or workplace but potentially anywhere in the world. Having students work together through these life skill activities to tackle a creative challenge and allowing them to reflect on their learnings will allow them to better grasp what it means to be part of an increasingly collaborative and connected society.
- Invest in evaluation and analysis
A growing number of pieces of information are being discovered and shared on a regular basis. In the near future, half of the facts that students memorise today will no longer be accurate or complete. The goal is to teach students to not only find accurate information but also critically analyse its reliability and usefulness. You can develop these essential 21st-century life skills for students by integrating life skill activities like research-based tasks and projects into your teaching.
- Build resilience and tolerance
Employers will be searching for candidates who are open-minded and able to communicate with cultures and ideas that they are unfamiliar with in order to work in this increasingly collaborative and global environment. These life skills for students can be developed through life skill activities like open discussions and experiences that allow students to communicate confidently with others. You can demonstrate students' open mindsets in action through school trips, debates, workplace visits, and Q&A sessions with famous persons.
- Leverage students' strengths to learn
Our brains are wired to want to learn. The strengths we're born with also affect how we feed the appetite for learning and growing our strengths can help us better feed it. The development of young minds is not one size fits all! Creating curriculums that fit each individual can be difficult. With a little thought ahead, however, you can determine which parts of your class will appeal to the strengths and interests of specific students. Using "front-loading" techniques can expose students to certain topics at the start of your lectures, which can encourage their natural curiosity.
- Embrace learning beyond the classroom
Students will be able to retain and retrieve what they learn in the classroom much more readily if they repeatedly use what they discover in different, personally meaningful ways. Furthermore, it will provide them with a better understanding of the importance of certain skills in their everyday and future lives. You can provide opportunities for students to apply what they learn in school to real-life situations as life skill activities- for instance, when solving a problem, you could ask them how they would approach a hypothetical scenario and the steps they would take to solve it.
Our education at NSK International Residential School expands beyond classrooms and opens up a new channel called "co-visual learning" (see to learn or see to believe). The teaching-learning process at our school stresses the importance of exposing students to experiences outside of the classroom. Athletics, sports, games, archery, taekwondo, achievement in the fine and performing arts, field trips, study tours, etc. are some of the extra curricular activities at school that we have. As part of our regular curriculum, we incorporate art and craft, robotics, ICT, etc. In addition to athletics, other extra curricular activities example, fine and performing arts, music, dance, literature, painting, etc. NSK International Residential School offers learning experiences in other areas as well.
We take our students out of the classroom periodically, especially during weekends, as a part of life skills activities to observe the seasonal, diurnal, and cyclical changes. For example, sounding bird songs, observing plant and insect flowering, watching bees and butterflies hovering, observing soil and water-borne animals, seeing ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers, visiting museums, zoos, exhibitions, and observing rocks, fruits, and vegetables as life skills for students.
Through a variety of formal and informal life skills activities, experiences, and values such as love, tolerance, peace, respect for teachers, respect for elders, discipline, punctuality, cleanliness, personal hygiene, sincerity, and truthfulness are exposed to. During our ongoing life skills activities for students, we teach communication skills, debating skills, leadership skills, problem-solving techniques, team spirit, analytical thinking, argumentation, decision-making mechanisms, conflict resolution and crisis management, managing emotions, empathy, etc.