Essential for Living Practitioner’s Handbook

Do you know what the essential eight skills are...and why they're the most important skills you can teach children and adults with disabilities?

Take a look at Essential for Living, a communication, behavior, and functional skills assessment, curriculum, and skill-tracking instrument for children and adults with severe disabilities, including autism, and limited skill repertoires.

Essential for Living is a communication, behavior, and functional skills assessment, curriculum, and skill-tracking instrument for both children and adults with moderate-to-severe disabilities. It is especially useful for learners with limited communication repertoires, minimal daily living skills, or severe problem behavior. With children, it can be used in conjunction with the VB-MAPP or the ABLLS, both also available from Special Needs Project.

This instrument is based on concepts, principles, and empirically-validated procedures from applied behavior analysis (ABA) and from B.F. Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior (Skinner, 1957). Essential for Living is both an assessment and a curriculum. It is used to determine the current performance level of each child or adult with respect to skills that are part of the instrument, in other words, to conduct a curriculum-based assessment. This instrument is also used to develop appropriate goals and objectives for individual education or support plans and to track skill acquisition and problem behavior. It was developed by Patrick McGreevy, PhD, a behavior analyst with 40 years experience with children and adults with severe disabilities. He was assisted by Troy Fry and Colleen Cornwall, who also have extensive experience with children and adults with limited skill repertoires and severe problem behavior.

"Transition planning, at any age, is challenging and is often made more so by our limited understanding as to what skills are central to effective living as an adult. Thankfully, we now have Essential for Living to guide us in that process.

"Comprehensive, thoughtful, and user-friendly, Essential for Living provides parents, educators, behavior analysts, and transition specialists a much needed road map to identify and develop those skills and abilities that have a direct and meaningful impact on the lives of their students and clients. Essential for Living should be the first resource you reach for at the start of transition planning and then kept close at hand throughout the process. Highly recommended."--Peter Gerhardt, JPG Consultation Group