February is always associated with hearts and love! Are you and your students familiar with the love languages? Why not use this Love Languages for Children Lesson to teach your students about Gary Chapman’s five love languages as they pertain to parenting? Read on to learn more.
Category: Child Development
Time Management Lesson
Time is an amazing thing! We all have equal amounts of it! It’s something we all need, however, we all view it and use it differently! Is your personal and family time balanced or is it a hot mess? This Time Management Lesson explores a variety of concepts associated with time management, culminating in an engaging family planning exercise that will have your students thinking critically as they organize life events for a family!
Multiple Intelligences with Potato Head Toys
If you teach about the multiple intelligences, you may want to give this one a try. Multiple Intelligences with Potato Head Toys will not only engage your students because this is a hands-on activity, but you may even get a smile or two out of your students as they “play”—oops, I mean “learn” about this topic! So, if you have some of these classic toys stashed away, it may be time to dig them out and give them a new life and purpose in your classroom! If not, I’ve linked them below.
Eating Disorders
Unfortunately, since the pandemic, Eating Disorders have been on the rise. I’ve been seeing a lot of requests for updated lessons on Eating Disorders. So in this post you will find a variety of engaging lessons to help keep your students focused as they learn more about the three most common types of eating disorders.
Family Strengths: Game Night
Family Strengths: Game Night is a great way to teach your students about components that make up a strong family! Not only does it get the entire class involved, but it’s a lot of fun! While many students may have grown up with a night set aside for games, many don’t get this opportunity for “community” in their own homes so this exposes them to it as well as a variety of board games that have them communicating, collaborating, thinking, practicing patience and good sportsmanship among others. It’s also a great lesson to do around the holidays as it is a pretty low prep lesson on your part, but engaging enough to keep students interested.
30 Days of Holiday Fun Project
December is a hectic time for most families making it even more difficult to spend quality time together. This 30 Days of Holiday Fun Project is a great project to help promote family bonding when schedules are busy and harried! Add diversity by incorporating many different holidays. Read on to learn more…
Child Safety: Mystery Powder Identification
When teaching about safety in child development, it’s important to discuss mystery substances that may or may not be toxic, but look like a variety of possibilities. The Child Safety: Mystery Powder Identification is a quick little activity where students observe substances via pictures and try to identify the substance. Not as easy as you might think! Read on to see how this works…
FCS HOT Topics: Good Idea or Bad Idea
One way to get students talking is to throw out a contentious topic because there are bound to be differing views! I’ve taken some topics that I feel fit this category
for both food and child development/parenting classes. FCS HOT Topics: Good Idea or Bad Idea has students looking at each topic and researching in more detail the good and bad components of it before sharing with the class. Not only is this an engaging assignment because it includes collaboration, communication and critical thinking, but it could be done weekly or quarterly and is tied to a writing assessment for those of you who need to include writing as part of your curriculum. The lists below obviously do not include every topic, but if you have a great topic that you believe should be included, please let me know by adding it to the comments.
Children’s Book Character K-Cups
Last fall, I saw a lot of cute children’s book character pumpkin projects surface all over social media! While the pumpkin characters are/were super cute, I feel like the project limited itself to only the fall season. With that being said, I wanted to come up with a similar project, but one that could be done ANY time of the year and with minimal cost as empty K-Cups are used as the base of the character! AKA~ Book Character K-Ups! How’s that for sustainability and upcycling!
Relationship Videos
Movies and movie clips can be a great way to add and increase interest to a lesson or topic. Jeff Brown, of Colorado, teaches a Psychology of Relationships
course (any many others) at Rampart High School and has an amazing collection of Relationship Videos that he has created for that class. He is graciously sharing his video collection with us, along with his websites which are chocked full of materials for various content areas. So, if you’ve been struggling to add more interest and engagement to your relationship lessons, you are definitely going to want to check these out!