Daily living skills cover a broad range of areas, including managing frustration and emotions, social interactions, budgeting and money skills, transportation, and career goals. Practicing these skills should be as naturalistic as possible, so that students make the connection between the classroom and their day-to-day lives. SMART boards give students practice while making the activity fun. These activities can also mimic things that students will do when they are older, such as banking and bill-paying online. Familiarity with technology is a life skill, just as much as self-care activities are for today's students.
Teaching students social skills with the SMART board helps them improve their interactions with other people. Social skills include hygiene, eye contact, personal space and managing stress. A lesson for a younger group of students could start with reading "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" by Judith Viorst and then going to the SMART board to solicit things that happened to the students on a bad day and what they did to make themselves feel better.
Students can use the SMART board to explore careers and learn about the skills necessary to work in different fields. You can adapt Powerpoint presentations to make matching games where children take the picture of a person and match it to his job. Older students should know how to classify jobs and identify the education level that they will need to work in that career. This can be a cross-curriculum activity, where you introduce geography to show where the jobs are located as well as math and money to compare wages.
Money skills are crucial to independent living. You can use a SMART board to teach budgeting skills; sites such as the Exchange.SmartTech.com offer lesson plans and games for students to practice estimating their cost of living compared with how much income they might earn in various careers. Other activities related to budgeting include learning to make and follow a grocery list and how to balance a checkbook. These SMART board games give the students feedback on their math skills as they check their answers as they work.