My daughter with special needs recently joined Girl Scouts. The troop wrapped up their cookie pre-sale and it was a huge success! The six girls in the troop sold over 700 boxes of cookies! Amazing job girls!
However, the number of boxes is not all that matters. According to their website, the sale is “the largest girl-led entrepreneurial program in the world”! They have an important mission for the program and that is “to help girls learn five skills essential to leadership, to success and to life”.
The five skills are:
- Goal Setting
- Decision Making
- Money Management
- People Skills
- Business Ethics
Girls with special needs are capable of being leaders and learning all of these skills. I think it’s important to adjust the lessons to match their cognitive and physical abilities so they can fully realize the benefits of this program. For example, my daughter is cognitively impaired and does not understand the concept of being an entrepreneur or running a business. However, she can understand, and have more useful application, if the skills are taught in the context of daily tasks, school work or other functional living skills. I’ll share with you how my husband and I helped her learn each of the skills through the cookie selling process.
Goal Setting
The Girl Scouts have a catalog of shiny, fun prizes that the girls can earn with cookie sales. This encourages them to set a sales goal for a prize they really want. Our daughter showed interest when we showed her the prizes. She perked up when we talked about how selling cookies would help her troop to continue to have fun meetings at school. But I think the concept was too vague for her to grasp. So I compared the cookie sale to a familiar school process. At her school, they have an incentive program that encourages positive behavior. The school has a store called “The Gotcha Store”. The kids earn “Gotcha” dollars when they demonstrate positive behavior such as being a good friend, asking for things nicely, helping the teacher, etc… Once every couple of weeks they can take their “Gotcha” dollars to the store and pick out a prize. I explained to her that selling a box of cookies was kind of like earning a “Gotcha” dollar. For each box sold it would count as a “dollar” and would add up to earn one of the prizes. I think the comparison helped to connect the dots for her.
Decision Making
We needed an efficient way to sort through the 100+ boxes of cookies. To streamline the process, we set up a cookie assembly line organized by color. Then we let her make some decisions on how she wanted to be involved. Did she want to be the one to pick the boxes or hold the bag? She chose to pick the boxes. Did she want to sit or stand to help? She chose to sit down to pick the boxes. Next, I called out the color and number of boxes to be picked. Her job was to search for the color then count the correct number of boxes. She did an excellent job! For fun, we added some impromptu storytelling to the process. I would enthusiastically call out the orders by name: “Uncle Brian ordered 4 boxes of cookies!” We would then talk about what kind of cookies he ordered and how fun it was going to be to deliver them. We made up ridiculous stories for each order and laughed as we packed each order.
Money Management
This part of the process was a natural extension of her school work because she is currently working on identifying the different bills and coins at school. For each cash order I would lay out the money and ask her to pick out a specific bill such as a $1, $5 etc… Then we would try and add them up. She is able to do some simple math problems so we stuck with that and didn’t worry too much about getting a grand total for the orders. It was a fun way to identify money and practice some math.
People Skills
One of Caitlin’s strengths is her social skills. She loves being around people and talking with them. Delivering cookies was definitely a highlight for her! We had a number of places to deliver to and she loved making the rounds to all her customers. We went to our church to drop off a few boxes. We visited one of our friends at her photography studio. We made deliveries to homes of family and friends. She goes bowling on Wednesdays and a few friends came up to hang out a pick up their orders. She has difficulty with speech so we practiced a short script that she could say to her customers. It went like this: “Here are your cookies. You owe me X dollars ”. It was short and to the point. She was able to say it some of the time. Otherwise, we would encourage her to say a shorter phrase such as “Thank You!”
Business Ethics
For Girl Scouts, business ethics boils down to simply doing the right thing. The only thing I can think of that relates to this is when we were bagging up the cookies. She was acting very silly and would throw the boxes in the bag very hard. We explained that this was banging up the boxes and the customers would not like that. We also explained that the cookies could get crushed and the customers would be sad that their cookies were broken. We suggested that she place them more gently in the bag so they wouldn’t get banged up or broken. She thought about it for a moment and then began to place the cookies in the bag more gently. Our daughter can get overly excited which can result in inappropriate behavior for certain situations. I appreciate opportunities like this to teach appropriate behavior.
Are there any activities that helped your child with special needs to learn life skills?
Any tips you can share for teaching your child life skills?
JoAnn’s journey as a parent and caregiver to an individual with disabilities started when her daughter was born pre-maturely with multiple health issues resulting in cognitive, physical and speech disabilities. Over the years, JoAnn discovered that recreation, travel and social experiences can bring happiness and relief to a life that is often stressful and frustrating. She loves to seek out adaptive, accessible and fun activities for her daughter and the whole family to enjoy. She started the blog www.OurSpecialFunOasis.com to share her uplifting stories and positive ideas to help and to inspire others.