Transition Week 5/30-6/2
Theme: Pets — Skill Building: Loving Care
Self-Advocacy, Rights & Responsibilities
Show and Share (5-10 min)
What kinds of tricks have you trained your pet to do, or would like to train your pet to do? Why is training important for both pets and people?
Thematic Activity 01 (10-12 min)
Read about training animals (SeaWorld)
PRESENTERS: You can stop at the "Learned Behavior" section, or continue if your group is interested.
Watch this video to see how training make a learned behavior repeat when a certain signal or cue is given.
- Whenever the animal repeats the behavior you give a reward
- Never punish an animal because you will teach the animal to be afraid of you instead of learn from you
- When animals are frightened they can become aggressive
After enough repetitions of a reward the animal will do the behavior even without a reward. All animals, including people, will do certain things for rewards they like
<Body Break>
Skill Builder Activity (15-20 min)
Review the 3 scenarios of loving care, perfunctory care, and neglect.
Go over the *checklist of features of each kind of treatment. People can use their home copy to mark along with the group.
PRESENTERS: Click on the image to enlarge and note the addition of "Aggressive" on the list of ways to categorize behavior. Try to give learners some idea of how aggression is different from neglect.
These ideas aren't black and white. What is neglectful to one person may be perfunctory to another. We will do more similar activities in the future to help people get a "sense" of such things.
All humans show these behaviors at different times. Sometimes people don't realize their behavior is a problem. We can say "I don't like the way..." and describe what we are not happy with, to help them realize.
Think of people who provide you services as their job. Support staff, job coaches, and board and care home operators all qualify. Complete the *worksheet on evaluating the paid care services you get. Share the results with a partner or the group.
Thematic Activity 02 (5-10 min)
Animals train us too. Watch this video!
How house pets train their owners
What behaviors do animals in your life do that make you respond in certain ways? Staff can answer too.
<Body Break>
How We Train One Another
Complete *your own reward checklist .
Don't forget to add your own items. When people work with you they can know how to reward your hard work in ways you like.
Thematic Activity Expanded
These videos are really engaging so we couldn't resist including them.
Animal Employees (5-10 min)
Choose one (or more) of these videos on training service Dogs
- Training puppies to be service dogs
- (animation) The story of PIP
- How Service Dogs are Trained PRESENTERS: This video is 10 minutes so you can pick and choose or watch through depending on time and interest.
What did we learn today?
