I know it’s only July, and it’s summer break, but I want to share a beginning of the year, Get to Know You Action Figure Activity with you. This activity will help you not only ease back into the school year, but help you get to know your students more quickly and give you an instant bulletin board to boot! It also is a fun way to use AI in a creative, meaningful way….check it out!
I’ve been in the FACS profession for a very long time and it seems to me that this “new” concept of Experiential Learning that I keep reading about has been something we’ve always done! We’ve always been about hands-on learning that focused on meaningful activities and putting theories into practice around real world and real life experiences! We’ve been developing students’ skills, critical thinking and preparing them for life from the get-go! So, if you’re not sure you are including experiential learning in your programs or courses, just take a look at the list below to see how you can do so or reaffirm that what you’ve been doing is a current pedagogical strategy and/or model.
A few years ago I created a couple of tarsia puzzles for use in helping students learn basic cooking tools and measuring abbreviations and equivalents. I had always meant to create more puzzles. Well, I finally got a new Tarsia Puzzles: Sewing Tools created! Be sure to check it out along with the additional sewing resources available. Please let me know if you have ideas for additional tarsia puzzles and I’ll see what I can do.
There’s a lot of components when teaching about salads! Use this Exploring Salads hyper-slide to help your students navigate through a variety of resources to learn more about salads and work their way into the kitchens in order to prepare all types of salads!
Engaging Ways to Teach Sewing Pattern Symbols shows you how you can teach sewing pattern symbols in a variety of hands-on, engaging ways. Every class is different! I’ve found, in my experience, that sometimes you need options for teaching as an activity that works well in one class may not work successfully in another. So check out the options below and choose one or more to try with your students when teaching about pattern symbols.
We all know that to manage our finances effectively, it helps to have a plan…aka budget. With that being said, many high school students and young adults have no idea how to do this. If you teach any courses, classes or units that include adulting or financial literacy, this Salary to Budget Hyperdoc is a must to get them ready for life! Initially, the hyperdoc puts the learning in the hands of the students as they independently work through the basics about budgets before applying what they’ve learned in a simulated budget, paper plate visual project, using a randomly assigned occupation and salary. Learn more as you continue reading.
I’m a huge fan of hands-on activities for a variety of reasons! One of my favorites involves hexagonal thinking blocks. Not only does it provide students with engagement, but it also allows them to communicate, collaborate and think critically when working with the blocks. If you’d like to give this a try, check out the Calories & Exercise Lesson below.
We live in an age of distraction, especially with all of the notifications we receive on our personal devices such as phones and watches! These distractions are taking place at home, in school, and at the workplace preventing us from giving our full attention to people, tasks and even our surroundings. While some schools have gone to a no cell phone policy, many have not. This Phone Notifications: Distraction vs Focus lesson explores this problem using a variety of simulations and then aims to share strategies to minimize them.
A lot of teaching strategies require students to be in small groups. That can mean partners, triads, groups of 4 or even more depending on the activity or assignment. Sometimes you want students to create their own groups and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you want those groups to be random and sometimes you want them to appear random even though you’ve secretly formed the groups ahead of time. In Ways to Form Groups, you’ll find a variety of different ways to form and organize groups from the planned to the random!
We’ve probably all experienced a time when we were teaching that a student said the topic was boring! If and/or when that happens, put your students in the drivers seat and let them be the “instructors” of the information you want them to learn. Let them see how challenging it can be to be the teacher or often the “entertainer” of pertinent information! This Nutrient Advertising Campaign assignment does just that! Students must put together a persuasive ad campaign for an assigned nutrient and share it with the class. You may find they like presenting this way and you can use it with other topics or they’ll stop complaining when you are teaching!
