This post is from our #1 voted winner: Susie in Minerva, OH. Preparing her high school students for the work force is as important as ever in today’s economy. She truly believes in her students and their ability to be active and productive members in their community after high school. Susie helps her students to prepare for this new world with every tool she can provide them.
The Project: Being Prepared for the World of Work.
I teach a transition life skills class to students with multiple disabilities. I use the School-to-Work DVD series with worksheets I have made up and some home made video’s using a Flip Camera to show students role playing and real life situations about being prepared for work and how to interact at work. The students are engaged when watching the video’s of real job skills and sites where they can learn job skills and possibly become employed.
Learning Objectives:
Students will see past graduates in their current jobs putting into place some of the job skills/ life skills that we emphasize in our classroom daily. Students can see good and bad ways of dealing with different situations that may occur on a job site through role playing videos. Students will then get to go into those same job sites and experience some of the same situations and know how to respond or interact appropriately.
Materials:
Flip Camera, other “getting a job” curriculum, transition planning materials, job sites and real employees/employers. The Functional Skills System: Social Skills or Workplace Social Skills. The Life Skills Readers and other Read-to-Learn library sets are also great tools. I would like to use iPods/iPads to also run the videos on and take video for immediate reinforcement learning. PCI’s Getting Along with People Series would be a nice addition to what we are teaching as well.
Susie also says:
I very much love my job, and the materials and resources available have come along way since I began teaching 12 years ago. Thank you for continuing to look for interactive and engaging materials that can reach the students I work with. In the world today where it is getting more and more difficult for the average person to find employment has made it that much more important for my students who already have struggles to work through to be even more prepared for the world they will soon enter.
* * *
Brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant: http://http://www.weareteachers.com/teaching-ideas/grant/teaching-idea?app= 18246&grantId=75