New Skills for Care Workers in Learning Disability Settings 1 An activity based approach to education of students with severe and profound mental disabilities Isabel Amaral, João Ferreira School of Health Care Polytechnics Institute of Setúbal- Portugal Students with severe and profound mental disabilities (SPMD) often present difficulties with speech and language, as well as difficulties with independent movement. Such difficulties lead to reduced opportunities for diversified experiences and interactions with people and activities, creating difficulties to their communication and language development. The inability to communicate properly, in turn, increases difficulties in accessing the world and engaging in meaningful experiences, reducing development and learning opportunities. A framework for intervention with SPMD At the time they start kindergarten, normal children have developed a set of skills resulting from incidental learning in frequent and contextualized experiences. They speak (though speech may not yet fully developed), they understand other peoples laŶguage, they about know family spaces (where they eat, where to bathe, where to go shopping), they know the actions and activities in such spaces, they know the material used for each activity, they know the relationships between spaces, materials, people. Their cognitive, social, autonomy, and language skills, constitute the basis of kindergarten activities which develop, increase and systematize incidental learning done before starting school. When a child with SPMD is included in kindergarten he has not such an array of experiences. As we said above, this child is limited in the ability to explore and participate in activities and also in the ability to understand information conveyed by adults or by the environment. These limitations have devastating effects on development and require that intervention strategies are targeted to meet those needs. Most intervention approaches for people with SPMD have in common the need to be developed in context and to be supported by activities that are part of the student´s life (Bricker & Cripe, 1992, Amaral et al, 2006). Developing such approaches requires from schools an adaptation which often goes beyond what schools are normally prepared to offer his students.