For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is the last of my series of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy. As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!
In the 'tools' download you will find lost of explanations and discussions about the different types of evaluation tools like structured and semi-structured interviews, role plays, surveys and types of survey questions. Also set out are some more qualitative methods like draw and write. In addition, there are twelve activities to engage children and young people and to stimulate discussion and information. Young people can feel uncomfortable in a formal interview or even a focus group discussion. A creative activity can helps to get their attention and focus and stimulate opinions. The informal chatting that happens during a creative activity acts as 'warm up' and often results in deep and interesting reflections at the end of the activity. To give you a sense of the contents here is the list of activities:
1. CD Covers
2. Collage
3. Shields
4. Masks
5. The Most Significant Story
6. Speech bubbles
7. Picture This
8. Builder
9. Draw and write
10. Moving Circles
11. Image Theatre
12. Fill in the blanks
For step by step explanations on how to conduct each activity and for examples how some of the partners of the Jacobs Foundation have used these download the full version of the toolkit here.
