Life Skills Training Provides High School Students as Mentors to Middle School Students

Adolescence is a challenging time for both children and their families. For many teens, the issues of hormonal fluctuations, compounded by the transition from childhood to adulthood, poses great distress. Because there are many peer pressures facing our teens, it is important to instill positive support and encouragement to assist in this transition into adulthood with as few health-compromising habits developing.

Life skills education is becoming increasingly more common in the high school setting. In many schools, the curriculum for life skills training is created by the teaching staff. To be effective, life skills education for high school students but be easy to understand, applicable to real-life experiences and must be easily taught by the instructor. In many school districts, these programs are offered as extra classes after school or before school but, in some schools, the lessons are incorporated into the classroom.

In some school settings, the life lessons are taught to high school students and then modified, for age-appropriateness, and transferred to middle school students. Acting as mentors, high school students are even teaching these life skills to middle school students in structured programs that span over a 10 week period, in one hour sessions. One of the most used topics involves goal setting.

Because many middle school students look to high school students are their mentors, it si important that high school students are well educated in the life skills themselves. Learning to set goals, to think beyond high school, and how to take control of their destiny and future is important. Instilling the value of goals is important to the teenager's success. By incorporating problem solving skills into the goal setting platform, teens are educated in some of the most important life skills which they then pass along to middle school students. This bridge between middle school and high school students provides for a social support network that has been foreign to many school districts in the past.