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Locating Life Skills in Daily Classroom Activities
The opportunities to acquire life skills are as numerous as the available settings for the young Filipino child. The
institutions that he / she grows up in and with, provide these. The home, school, church and society provide interplay of
forceful influences that become giant sources of learning and (eventually acquiring) life-skills. It is however in the most
structured learning environment, the school where these skills can be best recognised, processed, clarified, refined and polished.
Language for example is learned in the homes, churches and streets. The use of appropriate language (means, modes and themes)
are better learned in school.
The primary purpose of this paper is to spell out some issues that an instituted learning environment called the classroom,
face when asked about its contribution to help the child build skills that are necessary for life. Consequently, this paper
proposes programmatic measures that can equip the classroom and the foremost gatekeepers (the teachers) to resolve the issues.
What are Life - Skills?
Life skills in its broadest sense are skills necessary for a person to live. Narrowing it further, these skills are,
expected of the person to perform; dictated by the norms; or created over a changing period of time. The maximum use of the
brawn for example during the early centuries was a life-skill. What the brain can do followed next over the 20th century.
Today, the healthy interface of the brawn (fitness), brain (intellect), and spirit (affect) makes up the fundamental set of
skills that a person needs to be able to live.
For the child of the 21st century, preparing him or her to build such interface becomes imperative. These skills range
the flow of critical thinking, responsible acting and reflective feeling. To be able to do that, education leaders designed
what is known as learning competencies. Alas, all competencies are skills, but these competencies can only become life skills
- when one is able to locate its GOOD use in everyday life.
Competencies vs. Life Skills
There seems to be a conflict in the use of the word competency. One is COMPETENT if one is able to SATISFY a certain degree
of standard. Say, a competent teacher wins over the task of teaching. The standard use here of course is how he or she is
able to deliver the teaching and learning experiences to the learner, i.e., pupils.
A skilled teacher on the other hand is ABLE to teach. The irony lies where the education department claims that the sets
of learning competencies listed are actually mere minimum abilities.
By abilities of course, we mean being able to, while by competencies strictly speaking means being good at.
Meanwhile, the proponents of life-skills education seem to look for real competencies; where and when a child is able
to win-over life itself.
Then again, a rose called by any other name will still smell as sweet. So instead of arguing about definitions. Let
us take a look at the paradoxical issues and resolve them. There is a need therefore to look for a reconciliation of the
concepts, between life skills and competencies. Perhaps, we can call them, minimum applied abilities.
Identifying these abilities
What children and young people can do vary according to a number of identified factors, such as age, milieu, setting,
orientation and culture. Whether these factors allow the child to acquire and consistently practice skills to reach maximum
ability or competency needs to be considered. In attempting to list these capabilities down, the evolving capacities brought
about by growth and development in children provide the outline, while the four broad areas of the Children's rights can well
provide the framework.
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What are life skills?
Life skills have been defined as abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively
with the demands and challenges of everyday life; WHO, 1993)
Viewed in this context, life skills are innumerable. There is however a set of core skills that is at the heart of skills-based
initiatives for the promotion of health and well-being of children and young people.
The Core Life Skill
Self-awareness
Critical thinking
Creative thinking
Problem solving
Decision making
Empathy
Effective communications
Interpersonal skills
Coping with stress
Coping with emotions
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