When I first started teaching about employability skills, my lesson was pretty dull, a real snoozer! Over the last few years, I’ve reworked the lesson to make it more interesting and engaging for my students. One of my all time favorite movies, The Pursuit of Happyness, is also incorporated into this lesson because it contains a ton of examples of employability skills in actiont! Check out the lesson below if you need to spice up your employability skills materials!
Students love to doodle! Children love to color! Adult coloring books are everywhere! The theory behind this phenomenon is that it is a way to relax and decompress, in addition to being a creative outlet. So, is this really a good way to deal with stress or just a trendy way to promote a product? This lesson focuses on stress, and has students investigating this theory by researching and application before deciding whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea!
Finding an apartment, understanding the lingo and reading a lease should be skills that all young adults know how to do as they take on adulting responsibilities! I begin this lesson by having students decipher some common abbreviations that I’ve seen/heard used via an interactive game. Students then move onto deciphering actual apartment lingo, work with sample ads, read the classifieds (which may be foreign to some students) and eventually read and answer some questions pertaining to an apartment lease. This at least gives them an idea of what’s involved when the time comes for them to actually find an apartment!
If you teach anything about job interviews, you may want to consider using an episode from the television series The Job Interview. This show takes an inside look at potential employees as they interview for a specific job. Students get to see firsthand what the interviewees are wearing, how they act and how they respond to specific questions and problems. Employers react and discuss how each candidate’s mannerisms and answers impact their decisions. This show offers many great discussion points and easily holds the attention of high school students.
Another breakout here…this time with laundry! Laundry can be so dry and boring to teach that I wanted to put together something interactive and a little challenging for students to apply the information they learned. This is in keeping with my other breakouts as the challenges involve completing activities that lead to four digit codes that unlock succeeding boxes, ultimately, reaching the final prize box! I was not disappointed as students really worked well together in their randomly assigned teams, utilizing their knowledge and a little technology as they competed and collaborated to solve the challenges in under 43 minutes!
Over the years, I’ve written a lot of letters of recommendation for my students as I’m sure many of you have. Most of the time I had to either probe them for more information about their involvement in both in school and community activities or ask the guidance office for more information. When I started teaching my Career and Consumer Science class (similar to Adulting 101), I decided to include this assignment. Once students completed their digital activities resume, they could easily share it with perspective teachers, coaches, bosses, etc who would write them letters and it could be updated quickly as their activities changed. It’s also beneficial when filling out college applications as it’s a snapshot of their high school career. So, if you’re tired of tracking down background information on students who ask for recommendations, give this assignment a try!
I spent time this past summer browsing on the internet and reading teacher comments on Twitter. One of my favorite things is to watch TedTalk videos. I kept coming across ideas that what we teach students will be obsolete in 40 years, many future careers have not been invented, how fast knowledge doubles, advances in artificial intelligence, brain research, etc. So, what’s a teacher to teach? Or more importantly, what is it that students must be able to know and do to thrive in a future world full of unknowns? You may have additional thoughts but some of mine are students must be literate, be adaptive, be problem solvers, be able to think-outside-of-the-box, use technology, communicate effectively with others, work with others, and re-invent themselves in the workplace. Then, for the first time in my long career, my school adopted a partial block schedule with the first 2 days of the school year being block days. Students need to have positive experiences so they want to come back the next day plus I didn’t want to bore them. So, I wrote the Gidgee Gadget lesson. Take a look below to see what it’s all about!
Shopping for a dorm is a necessary task if you are heading to college, and can be quite a daunting experience if you’ve never done it before! It seems like college students today need a lot more as incoming freshman than what I ever needed in four years of college (many moons ago)! I discovered this when preparing to send my first born off to college a few years ago and as we look forward to repeating it with child number two next summer. Having that experience prompted me to create this project to help students see what colleges suggest they bring and the cost involved. It also allows them to discern between what they will truly use and need versus what they don’t, eliminating a lot of excess spending! This is a real eye-opener for students as they prepare for moving into dormitory living!
Being randomly assigned a college roommate is akin to opening a box of chocolates! To quote Forrest Gump, “You never know what you’re gonna get!” I like to “try” to prepare my students for this because it can make or break their college experience. The saying that “you really don’t know someone until you live with them” is completely true. I was fortunate in my college experience to have great roommates, whom I got along well with, but not everyone is so lucky! This lesson tries to prepare them for the various types of “roomies” they could encounter and how to deal with each in a constructive way.
During my unit titled “Off to College”, we talk about a variety of topics related to college living and dorm life. One of these topics includes the “Freshmen 15”. Students always wonder if it’s true and if so, how does it happen. Since students were curious, I decided to let them figure out the answers by having them research the topic and create a game board that incorporated all of the information they learned in a fun, creative and competitive way. Students took turns playing each others games, providing feedback and learning something about the “Freshman 15”!
