Top 10 Soft Skills and How JAKAPA Builds Them

Below outlines the top ten soft skills and how JAKAPA helps build them. You can help your child build these skills by making sure they are engaging with JAKAPA every day for 10 to 15 minutes and by talking to them about these skills and how they have impacted your success. 

1. Time Management: JAKAPA has students identify a broad goal and what they can do daily to achieve that goal. They can set a goal related to time management and track their ability to stay on top of the many things they need to do each day.
2. Communication skills: JAKAPA’s social engagement skills include several types of communication. Each day, your child should complete a Did, Felt, Tell Journal where they practice communicating what they did and how they felt about it.
3. Strong work ethic: JAKAPA teaches students to build habits and routines that help them build soft skills. Just by participating each day for 10-15 minutes, students can develop a strong work ethic and build self-reflection habits.
4. Resiliency: JAKAPA’s emotional resilience skills help students learn to bounce back when things don’t go as planned and build stress regulation skills. Daily, they complete a Make a Stress Plan challenge where they track stress levels and their ability to manage stress. They also complete a Build a Positive Brain challenge that teaches them optimism and helps them recognize the great things that happen each day, even when they were not expected!
5. Creativity: Creativity can be learned. JAKAPA’s Abstract Thinking challenge gives students a chance to consider an invention and its impact on the world to see if it is worth pursuing. They also learn the top ten ways to build creativity and are encouraged to practice them.
6. Problem-Solving: JAKAPA’s Practice Decision-Making challenge teaches students to solve their problems and make decisions using a process of reflection where they weigh options and rank them.
7. Team Player: Cooperation is one of our sets of skills. Our communication and collective goal setting practice can help them become valuable members of teams.
8. Leadership: Learning to convince others to follow you requires strong problem solving skills and good communication skills. JAKAPA challenges both in our skill builders that are part of weekly challenges.
9. Interpersonal Skills: Social engagement is critical to success and our Did, Felt, Tell challenge helps students learn to communicate. Our Manage your Message challenge helps them to take other people’s perspectives into account and create powerful messages based on those perspectives.
10. A Keen Eye for Detail: Self-management is a set of skills related to time, task and detail management. Students can develop their detail management skills by setting daily goals related to checking their work and understanding instructions.