Category: Life Skills

Healthy Living Infographic

Tired of posters or PowerPoint presentations? This activity allows students to create their own infographic based on statistics and facts found on the Centers for Disease Control. An infographic is a visual way to represent facts and information. There are a few free sites that have templates to create infographics quickly. This mini project allows students to practice using data and creating graphs.

Decision Making Lesson & Group Activity

For years I struggled with how to teach decision making more interactively.  I wanted students to know and understand the process and be able to apply it to important decisions in their lives, but I also wanted an activity where students…

Task Rotation Learning Grids for the FACS Classroom

Looking for a thought provoking way to introduce a topic or concept via YouTube clip, poem, quote, short story, or song lyrics that engage students from beginning to end?  The task rotation learning grid, based on the book So, Each…

Internships Lesson

It is common to teach high school and college students about how to interview for jobs, how to fill out resumes and how to get a degree in line with their passion. It is not very common to teach students how to succeed on their very first internship. Not all interns are created equal. There are key differentiating factors. This lesson aims to teach students how to have a meaningful internship experience. This lesson can also be geared to students who are getting their first job.

Time to Feed the Baby: Homemade or Store Bought?

  New parents are faced with a lot of new experiences and decisions that need to be made.  Upon birth a new parent must decide whether or not to breast feed or bottle feed. Then when the infant reaches approximately…

Impact of Technology on the Family

It’s been said that the only thing that is constant in life is “change”. Our world is constantly changing and families are not insulated from the changes that occur in the society in which they live. One thing that seems…

Show Me the TV Family: Paper Plate Project

After teaching several lessons on family structures, family functions, and family life cycle stages, I use this lesson/project as a way for students to review and apply information learned as well as a way for me to assess their learning. Students select a television family and create a TV Paper Plate Project using their knowledge of family to complete it. Students use mobile labs to research any unknown information about their TV family such as names of all family members or jobs TV parents held, etc.

Goals Make You Reach the Sky Activity & Bulletin Board

The winner of the February give away is this lesson from Jessica Uplinger, a Family Consumer Science teacher from Ohio. In her lesson, students learn how important goals are and learn to make their own.

Diaper Cost Analysis Project

What is the cheapest way to buy diapers? Do subscriptions to Amazon Prime or memberships to wholesale clubs really save you money on diapers? Why not do the math? This is a complex problem but easy enough to understand and develops student’s problem solving skills.

What is the best family cell phone plan? Problem Solving Lesson

Problem solving is one skill that has to be taught. If you think about it, we really want students who can problem solve, not memorize a whole bunch of facts or methods for doing something. This lesson happens to be about cell phone plans since it is a problem that students can easily understand yet is more complex so even our brightest students will be challenged in figuring it out.