The author offers curriculums, teaching guides, assessment instruments, and course descriptions for teaching independent living skills to handicapped adolescents and young adults. A guide on cooking and eating is designed to teach students how to use cooking utensils, cook healthy meals, plan nutritious meals, shop wisely, and budget food expenses. A separate course description outlines a program for teaching students to fix sandwiches, make soup, and fix simple snack items. A curriculum guide on money management focuses on basic money skills and consumer mathematics. A checklist of math and money skills is included as well as a mathematics pretest. A "General Experience Course for Students Unable to Take Academic Courses" is geared toward helping students work on basic communication skills and on developing gross and fine motor skills. A leisure time activities guide has three general goals--to develop and broaden interests in a variety of leisure activities, to become independent in initiating and engaging in leisure time activities, and to learn to make decisions and choices about the use of leisure time. In an independent living seminar, students discuss problems they are having and try to come up with solutions as a group. A current events class is outlined which emphasizes listening to, understanding, and discussing national and world news. A curriculum on how to talk to people covers such topics as faults in conversation, adjustment to other people, and nonverbal communication. Students learn principles of good grooming and techniques for improving their appearance in a curriculum titled "Looking Your Best." Also outlined are two brief courses on weight control and clothing maintenance. A checklist of reading skills is also provided. (SW)