At Functional Living Skills, our goal is to create the most useable developmental tools to help teach practical life skills to children and adults with developmental disabilities and autism spectrum disorder. In creating the Assessment of Functional Living Skills Protocols, we made it a point to ensure that each of the tools you’ll find on our website are appropriate for a person of any age. In today’s post, we’ll be focusing specifically on creating an independent living skills checklist for parents of children with autism. Regardless of your child’s age, fostering these skills is beneficial.
Functional skills are present everywhere and they exist in every setting that you might find yourself in. If you’re seeking to create a checklist that allows you to track progress, the AFLS is the perfect solution. What can you expect from it? How can you tailor it to suit your child’s specific needs? That’s what we’ll be covering below, so keep reading to learn more.
Which Independent Living Skills Are Most Necessary?
Like all people, chances are that your child struggles in some areas and has success in others. That’s why we’ve broken down our protocols into six different types of skills, along with an AFLS Guide. The AFLS Guide serves as a companion that contains analysis for different tasks, suggestions for how you can teach skills, prompts you can offer, and more. It’s an amazing resource that goes hand in hand with all of the Protocols you’ll find below. It provides you with information about the features of the AFLS system from scoring, program development, and identifying goals and objectives while addressing the learner’s unique needs.
When you’re creating an independent living skills checklist, what skills does your child need to learn? The AFLS is broken down into the following skills:
- Basic Living Skills
- Home Skills
- Community Participation Skills
- School Skills
- Vocational Skills
- Independent Living Skills
The last Protocol focuses specifically on covering skills that a person might require in their daily life. It covers everything from self-care to organization to maintenance and cleaning to personal safety to problem solving to social interactions and more.
For example, one of the skills covered pertains to money management. An example of the tasks that are covered is developing a budget. The objective of that task is for the learner to develop a monthly and weekly budget that provides for all major needs, including food, shelter, clothing, and grooming supplies. A score can be given, ranging from 0 to 4. The criteria for receiving a 4 is that the learner develops their budget and adjusts spending when unexpected but necessary expenses arise.
You can learn more about the Independent Living Skills Protocol here, but the truth is that each Protocol contains a number of different attainable, learnable, and measurable skills designed with a pathway towards independence in mind.
Autism Resources You Can Count On
When you’re creating a checklist of independent living skills, our criterion-referenced tool is the perfect way to do it. Many transitions, college and independent living programs around the world are in need of this step-by-step guide to help define their learner’s strengths and weaknesses, and it’s a helpful tool to have for parents, caregivers, teachers, and anyone else who will be working with your learner.
About the Assessment of Functional Living Skills
Whether it’s helping children with autism or providing support for adults on the autism spectrum, the AFLS is designed specifically to provide a pathway to independence. The protocols about help learners to gain the confidence and the skills they need to function independently in life.
Feel free to take a look around our website to learn more about our authors and their backgrounds, the research we’ve done, working with AFLS, and much more. We also offer training and speaking and a number of other resources as well. At Functional Living Skills, we strive to help parents of children with autism to find practical ways to help their children succeed. Unique in its ability to meet individuals at their skill level, the Assessment of Functional Living Skills engages and guides its users across all environments in achieving the highest possible levels for the individuals they serve. Utilize it any time, anywhere and customize it to suit your unique needs.
