Apartment Living Activity

I have recently started an apartment living activity with a group of my students.  Each day, they get a checklist and they have to complete everything on it.  They have a mailbox they need to check, an email address, mail they need to send (rent, bills, etc.), and a checking account.  To help with their checking account I made a mock online banking website using the website http://www.weebly.com/.  The website I made is: http://cedargrovebelgiumbank.weebly.com/index.html.  It's pretty interesting watching my students try to complete these tasks independently.  I purposely have them check their email everyday to help develop the skill and even after a month, it's still a struggle for some of them to remember how to do it.  Hopefully they start to become more independent with it.  That's the goal.

As I was reflecting on my activity, I was thinking about a recent conference I went to where it was discussed that all life skills activities should be completed where they would naturally happen.  In a perfect, ideal world, I would go to my students' houses and we would do these things there.  However, we don't life in a perfect world and my cross-cat classroom with other students that are in and out all day do not really allow us to do so.  However, I was thinking one thing that might be kind of cool to do in the future is to actually get the kids a PO box from our local post office that we go and check daily or every other day.  I don't know how that would work though or how expensive it is to do something like that.  I may have to look into it for next year or upcoming years.