Career, Family, and Life Skills is a series of seven topics designed with the learner in mind to explore, discover, and support behaviors and experiences of healthy lifestyles. Each of the topics is presented in a curriculum outline format, allowing flexibility in teaching examples and approaches.

The Seven Components: Descriptions and Objectives

Activate Your Learning Potential

Goal: Learning to discover and experience the world around you

Description: Everyone learns. Each of us is born with a limitless potential for learning, and we learn in different ways. How we learn is a mystery—what we learn is the result of a learning process. The purpose of this segment is to determine what elements of learning are best suited to our successful comprehension, and to restore the feeling of achievement when learning is accomplished.

Objectives: Upon completion of this segment, learners will be able to:

• Discover natural ways of learning
• Rediscover that learning can be a positive, joyful experience
• Develop skills and strategies which activate positive learning experiences
• Change behaviors which present roadblocks to learning
• Recognize their own limitless potential for learning.

Balancing Roles

Goal: Learning to successfully manage your roles at home and work

Description: Job satisfaction and contentment at home, when experienced simultaneously by the same individual, indicate a combination of skills which are balanced and well-managed. Success depends on the student’s confidence that both areas can be maintained in acceptable ways. Balancing Roles will provide an opportunity for acquiring skills necessary to manage these multiple roles.

Objectives: Upon completion of this segment, learners will be able to:

• Acknowledge the many roles they play in their daily lives
• Determine the circumstances which connect them with their multiple roles
• Evaluate their management behaviors in each setting and discard the unproductive ones
• Develop strategies for productive multiple role management
• Promote positive self-esteem when handling multiple roles
• Build a strong support system

Communications

Goal: Learning to communicate with a purpose

Description: Many people lack the skills to really say what they mean. In this way, communication can be a barrier to their wants and needs. Ideas, thoughts, and feelings, when expressed clearly and positively, reflect direct, accurate communication between individuals, and thus, needs may be more easily fulfilled. This segment will explore methods for precise, effective communication.

Objectives: Upon completion of this segment, learners will be able to:

• Describe aspects of the communication process
• Transform thoughts and ideas into tangible messages
• Demonstrate effective communication skills
• Express anger and other strong emotions appropriately to maintain positive communication
• Approach conversations with new acquaintances and casual friends with confidence
• Build positive, strong support systems.

Eating Healthy

Goal: Learning to nourish body and soul

Description: Eating habits are an expression of both physical and emotional needs. Providing adequate nutrition for ourselves and our families requires insight and an understanding of these needs and what is required to fulfill them. Balance, harmony, and health are explored in this segment which focuses on eating problems among the elderly.

Objectives: Upon completion of this segment, learners will be able to:

• Monitor their present eating patterns
• Describe how their eating habits have developed
• Associate health problems with poor nutrition and describe the long-term effects of unhealthy eating on their bodies
• Choose eating behaviors to be changed and discuss positive nutrition habits
• Relate the effects of a wholesome diet to health and aging
• Create support systems to assist them in reaching their goals.

Making More "Cents"

Goal: Learning to manage your money

Description: Spending attitudes and behavior learned in childhood govern the decisions adults make about money. There are choices, and with choices comes power. This segment defines attitudes about money and explores strategies for controlling spending.

Objectives: Upon completion of this segment, learners will be able to:

• Monitor present spending behaviors
• Differentiate between needs and wants
• Develop new spending behaviors which will facilitate present and future spending goals
• Build positive, strong support systems to assist them in reaching their future spending goals

Parent Power

Goal: Learning to be effective parents

Description: Parenting is a learned skill and we often repeat the parenting habits of our parents. Yet, many parents want life to be different for their children. By relating their own experiences and healing, adult learners will change the dysfunctional patterns that no longer work for them. They will select alternative patterns which produce better results with their children.

Objectives: Upon completion of this segment, learners will be able to:

• Analyze their child’s needs and the extent to which they are meeting them
• Recognize the impact of their own childhood on their parenting style
• Maximize the effectiveness of their positive parenting behaviors
• Employ alternative parenting behaviors when current ones do not work
• Strengthen internal and external supports to assist them in their parenting

Relationships

Goal: Learning about the dynamics of relationships

Description: Relationships between people rely upon a foundation of communication. Positive, clear communication leads to positive understanding of one another. A breakdown of communication can be disastrous for a relationship. To avoid the failure of misunderstanding, we must draw upon our own strengths to invigorate our contribution to any relationship. This requires an inner thoughtfulness, a recognition of what others may perceive, and the ability to share our knowledge in a way that nurtures our relationships.

Objectives: Upon completion of this segment, learners will be able to:

• Define relationships as connections between two people
• Identify factors which influence relationships
• Recognize patterns in relationships
• Develop a positive attitude for change
• Build a strong support system.

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