Category: Life Skills

Frozen Pizza Comparison, Ingredient Investigation & Makeover Challenge

Teaching teenagers about nutrition and consumer skills can be difficult except when it involves pizza! Americans eat a frozen.pizzaton of pizza on a regular basis because it doesn’t require much time or effort and because it’s fairly easy on the wallet as well. However, do students really know which frozen pizza is the best as far as taste and money is concerned, what’s inside their favorite frozen pizza, how it’s made or even how to make a frozen pizza healthier? This lesson and all of its parts can be done in their entirety or can be selected in parts….it’s up to you and how much time you want to devote to this lesson and activities.

Teen Dating Violence

Dating violence is a big problem facing today’s population of young adults. Dating violence knows no boundaries anddating.violence does not discriminate. That’s why it’s important that our teens and young adults be educated about the characteristics and consequences of this all too common problem. The activities in the lesson help convey this information in a very interactive and hands-on approach.

Tower Team Building Activity

I recently led a team building activity that was really a lot of fun–spaghetti and gum drop tower building. The object of the activity is to work as a team to build the highest tower in the set amount of time. This activity is not only easy to prep, but also fairly inexpensive to put together.

The Shopping Challenge Lesson

#182153373 / gettyimages.com   This lesson allows students to create a two week menu and shopping list that will include all of the food and beverage items they will need to survive two weeks without starving or becoming dehydrated. To…

Birthday Party Project

There are times throughout the year that I need some “filler” activities due to testing schedules, the loss of seniors partybecause of graduation, etc. I don’t want to give my students free periods so I came up with a practical, creative project of planning a child’s birthday party. Originally this project was designed for my child development class as a team building activity but it could be used in a family unit as well. While this project is just about planning a party and the concepts that go with it, and fit into my time frame, you could easily adapt this project and make it relate to budgeting by giving students price limits or even make it a competition and incorporate a “cupcake wars” style approach. Either way students enjoy planning parties!

Popcorn: “Pop”pourri of Activities

This classic, fun food has been around for over 5000 years, transforms itself into snowflake and mushroom shapes, goes from un-edible to edible when exposed to heat, makes noise and is celebrated every January 19th!  You got it…it’s POPCORN!  These…

The Life of a T-Shirt: NPR Planet Money Inspired Lesson

I don’t know about your experience but in mine I’ve found that  high schoolers tend to think they know everything. So I just LOVE to teach lessons that make them unusually quiet, sitting on the edge of their seats soaking…

Fotor Photo Collages & Family Traditions

Families are unique and each family has different practices that become traditions over the years.  Traditions can be established early in life and will often be remembered and practiced into adulthood.  This project allows students to create a collage using…

Family Birth Order

Study after study shows that birth order plays a huge role in developing one’s personality.  Each birth order position has a unique set of characteristics.  This lesson engages every student in the class because everyone has a birth order position…

Strong Family Traits Inspired by Duck Dynasty

There’s a lot of buzz out there about this popular TV show called “Duck Dynasty” so I decided to watch it and discovered that it would be a great show to illustrate the traits of a strong family. This lesson introduces the traits of strong families to students, helps them recognize the traits in their own families as well as others, and then students create a PSA to help spread the word on the importance of strong families.