Essential skills for Learning
What are Essential skills for Learning?
This website is about the Essential Skills that all children and youth need to master, so that they can learn successfully at school. Essential skills for Learning are those skills that are typically mastered by the time a student reaches middle school. Essential Skills almost always are the focus of instruction for children and youth who are receiving services through an Individualized Education Program (IEP).
who is this website for?
This website is inspired by and designed for children and youth with disabilities, who are served by an IEP at school. This website will help you pinpoint the Essential Skills your child with a disability is struggling to master. This website is focused on the following disability categories:
ADHD
Autism
Language impairment
Refusal / Disruptive behaviors
Anxiety
Learning Disability - Reading, Writing, Math
Intellectual Disability
Neurological impairment: Vision, Hearing, and Motor impairments
Attachment and traumata
Superior intelligence with co-occurring disability (twice exceptional)
How does this website work?
Step 1: Identify your child’s primary disability. Your child’s disability category will usually be identified by a health care professional or by your child’s school team. If your child has not yet undergone any sort of evaluation, look at the list above and choose the disability category that seems to fit your child the best. If your child has more than one type of disability, start with the one that you think is the most important.
Step 2: Get to know the Essential skills that all children need to master. The skill sets below are the essential skills that all children need to master. They also represent the skill sets that children with disabilities struggle to master. Here are the Essential skills and skill sets hat are missing or under-developed in children with disabilities
Structural language skills
Pragmatic language skills
Social cognition
Executive Skills
Self-regulation skills
Reading
Writing
Math
Vision
Hearing
Motor skills.
Step 3. Create a link between your child’s disability category, and the essential skills that your child is struggling to master. Click on the disability category that you think best captures your child’s struggles at school and elsewhere. Each disability category from the list above (e.g. Autism, ADHD, Learning Disability) is associated with one or more Essential Skills that are missing or under-developed in your child. It’s those missing Essential skills that help explain why your child is struggling. The missing or under-developed Essential skills that you identify in your child will likely need to be a part of your child’s IEP at school.
Hint: Your child may be struggling with a very specific Essential Skill. But, it’s important to know that your child’s challenges will likely affect their performance in a skill set, not just one specific skill. Each page on this website highlights a specific Essential Skill that lies at the heart of your child’s struggles. Each of those skills is part of a skill set. Usually, your child’s educational program will need to address the whole skill set, not just one specific skill. Go ahead and click on some of the pages to see what Essential Skills are all about. Then, start step 4.
Step 4. Communicate with others about what you learned. Communicate with professionals who can help. Share what you’ve learned about your child’s struggles and the Essential Skill or Essential Skillset that you believe is holding your child back. Speak with your child’s classroom teacher, your child’s educational team, or your child’s health care providers. You can use your knowledge of Essential skills to help craft a special education program at school, and a therapeutic program outside of school. You can ask:
How is my child doing in this Essential Skill? in this Essential skillset?
Is this the Essential Skill or Skillset that explains my child’s difficulties? Or, do you think it’s another one?
How are you going to help my child make progress in this skill?
Step 5: Make good decisions about what’s good for your child. Make sure that your child is learning to master the Essential Skills presented in this website. By mastering Essential skills, your child will be able to participate more fully at school, at home, and in the community. At times, your child may not be able to master Essential skills. That’s important to know also- In those cases, you’ll can consider what types of accommodations will help your child function at their highest level.
Why are essential skills important?
Essential skills are just what they say: Essential.
Essential for learning. Essential Skills for Learning are essential for your child’s learning success. As defined in this website, Essential Skills are those skills that are taught starting in preschool and extending up to middle school. The absence or limited development of Essential Skills usually helps explain why some learners struggle to learn. If your child can master all of the Essential Skills of this Website
Essential for communication and planning. Essential Skills allow for better communication: Between you and your child; between your child and their professionals; and between your child’s professionals and you. By using the terms presented in this website, you can build consensus with your child’s therapists and school team about what skills need to be targeted in your child’s therapeutic program or in your child’s IEP. Each one of your child’s educational and clinical providers need to know about Essential Skills, and agree upon the Essential skills that may need remediation or specialized instruction. If you don’t all agree about the Essential Skills that are missing or under-developed in your child, it will be harder to identify remediation strategies and to work as a team.
Essential for progress monitoring. Essential Skills are essential for progress monitoring. When you have agreement about the Essential Skills that your child is struggling to master, you can also start to track your child’s progress.
overwhelmed yet?
Don’t worry. You’ll be visiting and re-visiting this website, and the same essential skills, for a while. Have the long-term view in mind. Typically developing children master Essential skills over the first 6 to 8 years of school. Your child might take longer. Some children and youth do not master all of the skills in this website. That’s OK. As you get to know your child, you’ll get a better idea about how far they can travel.
Abilities or skills?
Sometimes, your child might not fully master all of the Essential Skills described in this website. There can be more than one reason for this. Focus on the skills that your child can master. When your child cannot master Essential Skills, they can still develop their abilities.
Abilities are those skills that become possible with the right supports. For example, some children might not be able to speak, but they may develop the ability to use a visual communication system. Some children may not be able to walk, but they may be able to develop the ability to walk with a cane, walk with a walker, or move about in a wheelchair. Still other children may not be able to focus their attention successfully, but can focus successfully when provided with extra adult supervision.
It’s just as important to make progress in essential skills as it is to make progress in level of support. Some children with disabilities do not achieve full independence in the skill sets that you’ll discover in this website. That’s OK too, as long as they are reaching their maximum level of independence. Essential skills support your child’s independence and successful community participation. Your child’s abilities can do the same.
BEGIN YOUR JOURNEY
Are you ready to begin your journey? Click on the page with the disability category that you think matches your child the best. You’ll find the links at the top of this page. Read about the Essential skills that are related to your child’s disability category. The skills that you identify should be the biggest barriers to your child’s success. Focus on those skills first.
Share what you’ve with your child’s classroom teacher, special education team, or health care providers. Verify whether or not they agree with you about the disability category that best matches your child, and the Essential skills that your child needs to develop. All of the professionals involved in your child’s care can help you identify those essental skills- they just need to understand the terms presented in this website and have examples to share that match your child’s profile.
Disability, diagnosis, and Neurodiversity
If you want to know more about neurodiversity and the terms that we use in this website, click on the button below.
