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.
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!
One of my favorite “issue” topics to teach about is food waste. Too much of our hard earned dollars are spent on food and feeding our families for it to end up in the garbage! If you teach about food waste and are looking for some new, engaging ways to teach the concept to your students, I encourage you to check out this “New Ways to Teach About Food Waste” post.
Garnishing is defined as embellishing something. In this project, it pertains to food! In this project: Garnishing: Student Led Demonstration, students compile
the information on garnishing a specific food in a presentation and teach and/or demo the technique that can be used with the class! This project can then be shared with students via Google Classroom, keeping entire presentations together. Since students orally share, they can be graded as presented, making life easier at the end of the day!
I’ve heard many say “come to my home”, while others say “come to my house”. While similar, the two terms are different in meaning as well as how each meet our
needs. Home, House & Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs addresses all of these as it explores the similarities and differences between the two along with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This lesson provides an overview while engaging students in a variety of ways. So, if you teach about factors that influence our home and house selections, this may be a new way to go about it!
Ever wonder how many parents over the years have heard the phrase “I’m Bored!” during the summer months from their child or children? In this “Project: I’m Bored!”,
students research and curate activities to engage children of all age groups to not only prevent boredom, but help promote the developmental areas (PIES). This project is a great end of the year assignment or could even be used as a project for a substitute if you have to be out for day or two! Be sure to read on to learn more…
Did you know there are six types of picky eaters? I think we’ve all been exposed to at least one of them in our classrooms, especially when trying foods prepared in
the lab! So, what’s a parent to do when they have a picky eater? This Picky Eaters lesson has student groups exploring the six types and perform skits as they present the information on why it occurs and what parents can do.
In my younger years, the first section of the newspaper I would go for was the comics…especially the Sunday paper as they were in color! Even now, when I get the
chance to read an actual newspaper, I enjoy reading the comics (although it’s not the first section I go to). Why did I like them so much? Well, they were fun, humorous, interesting, thought provoking and left me curious with anticipation to see what the next strip would divulge if there was an ongoing storyline. As a teacher, I have used Comics in the FACS Classroom on numerous occasions, in many ways, to excite, engage and assess my students. Read on to learn how.
