Self-Management
Family Resources on Taking Control of Life
Lesson Topic
Students will analyze their competence in developing habits associated with high quality organizational skills.
Essential Question
How well am I doing in developing and maintaing habits that help me stay organized?
Taking Control of Life – Heather
If this lesson was used in the classroom: Students learned about developing habits to help stay organized. Students watched a video featuring Heather whose blindness does not interfere with her life. Heather must organize her life in a different way from a seeing person and students discussed their organizational skills and completed an “Organizational Skills Handout” as a way to help them understand their strengths and challenges in becoming more independent.
Getting Ready for the Conversation
The featured character for this lesson module is Heather. Heather has never been able to see, but she still does almost everything a seeing person can do. For Heather to become a more independent person, she has to organize her time and activities in different ways than most seeing people have to.
Conversation Starters and Practice at Home
The first item is for follow-up after viewing the lesson video and participating in class activities.
Tell about the “Organizational Skills Handout”. What are some things you rated yourself well on? Why do you think so? What are some things you did not rate yourself well on? Why?
Why is it important to learn organizational skills to become more independent?
Describe something that you would like to be more independent in doing? What are the organizational tasks that will be needed to accomplish this? Why is organization important to completing tasks or activities?
School to Home Resources on Taking Control of Life
Lesson Plan
Interactive Reflection > Open/Download Complete PDF Lesson
Organization Skills are important
In the video, Heather says “the stereotypes that some people give to blind people…they think they can’t do this”. Heather shows that she can do many activities that people with sight can do as well. Choose one the activities you saw Heather doing in the video. What organizational skills would be required for Heather to participate in the activity you chose?
Learning from Failure
Mr. Vrbka says that parents sometimes need “to watch, at times, their children fail…failing where it is safe to fail”. Describe a situation where you failed and learned something. Heather has failed at many things the first time she tried. Describe a situation where you imagine that she might have failed the first time and learned how to do something because of this failure.
Organizing takes work
As you probably have already noticed middle school is different than elementary school, because of this most students need help getting organized. This blog post was written by a teacher to help parents and students. Do you agree with the writer that you need a planner, a binder, a place at home to study and a family calendar? Why or why not? What else do you think you need to help you stay organized?
Visually impaired superheroes
Stan Lee was a comic book author who created the comic book character Daredevil, who is blind. Mr. Lee was worried when he first wrote about Daredevil because he was afraid real blind people would not like it. Read this article. How is Heather similar to the Daredevil?
Additional Reflection Questions > Open/Download PDF
