There seems to be a lot of concerns about motor skill development or the lack thereof when it comes to children being school ready. Normally, I teach about motor skills and the difference between fine or small and gross or large to my students. This year I took it a step farther and had my students explore the connection to academic success and motor skills. Below, you will find the lesson and activities that I used with my students to open their eyes to the importance of motor skill development in relation to a child's academic success.
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Importance of Motor Skills
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Groceries to Your Door: Compare & Contrast–Convenience Worth the Cost?
Have you ever made the statement “I wish I didn’t have to go to the grocery store! I wish my groceries could be delivered right to my door!” According to the media, online grocery deliveries are expanding and on the rise. This was a recent feature in our local Sunday paper and it caught my attention! I thought it a great way to have students investigate, research and analyze how cost effective the convenience of these services actually are. So, check out the activities below and if you have any suggestions, please share in the comment section below!
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Family Dinner Matters
One tradition that my family practiced as I was growing up was eating family dinner together regularly! I have wonderful memories of that dinner table; the fun and laughter as well as difficult conversations that ensued between my sisters and parents. This important tradition continued while raising our own children! How my husband and I will miss this daily routine as we rapidly approach the empty nest stage of our lives. Below you will find a lesson that promotes eating together as a family and the benefits along with a variety of engaging activities and projects that can be implemented in the FACS classroom. Hopefully, students will carry this concept to their home life so it becomes a recurring practice and a potential tradition with both their present and future families!
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Caring for Children: Symbolism Stations
With the start of school right around the corner, I bet you're looking for an interactive first day activity to use that is super low prep and easy to use in your child development class! This is a great activity, if you've often got a revolving door of students coming and going as schedules get adjusted, because you're not getting into important nitty-gritty content and notes yet! It's just a moving activity where students have to independently think outside the box, team up with other students for small discussions, collaborate on an brief oral presentation and complete a quick exit slip based on the activity/presentation....easy peasy! Did I mention that it's super easy to prep? All you need to do is print off the pictures and the answer strips and you are set to go! If you like it and plan to use it with several classes, you may want to laminate the pictures for durability.
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Healthy & Positive T-Shirt Messages
What I love about this assignment is that it can be adapted to almost any topic that you want students to walk away with messages promoting positive thoughts, actions, and attitudes! I initially created this to use when teaching about healthy dating relationships and after using it thought of umpteen other lessons that I could use it with. So let me give you some background and suggestions for implementing this and then let your students have at it as they develop their own original slogans, messages and images about whatever topic you assign. This is also a great template to use when running a design contest or for club t-shirts or fundraisers!
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Student Led Mini-Lessons for Food PreparationTerms & Kitchen Tools
The trend in education is to create student led activities, projects and presentations! After being inspired by a literary term assignment that my son had to create and teach to his AP Literature class, I thought, why not do this with food preparation terms and kitchen tools, letting students compile the information in a presentation and teach each other the materials! This easily became a template that I could share with my students via Google Classroom, keeping entire presentations together. Since students had to orally, present their term or tool, I could grade as they presented, making my life easier at the end of the day!
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Fashion Styles Project
Are your students into fashion? Do any of your students sport a specific fashion style? This is a two part project, however, the second part could be optional. It's an easy introductory activity to use at the beginning of a school year or course especially if your classroom is a revolving door with schedule changes. It could even be used as a sub plan because it doesn't involve a lot of fashion lingo or background fashion information in order to complete. These assignments get students researching and creating immediately with some additional extensions that can be used to further add to the activity!
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How do you work smarter, not harder?
Family & Consumer Science Teachers work harder than almost any other teacher, in my opinion, for many reasons. First, we have a lot of different preps that core subject teachers often do not have. Many of my core colleagues teach the same 2-3 preps all day long while I typically have 5. I know many of you have significantly more! Secondly, if you teach a foods class of any kind, you have additional planning and prep along with grocery shopping to squeeze into your day or week. I don't know about you, but I am at the point in my teaching career that I would like to work smarter, not harder regularly so that I'm not only sane by the end of the day or week, but still have some patience and energy left to deal with anything that comes up at home or with family. And finally, not spend what seems like every waking moment of evenings and weekends dealing with school work whether it be planning, creating or grading. Since most of us learn best from each other, thus this new feature! Ideally, I'd like to continuously update this post, as well as pose other questions, that inquiring teachers, experienced or inexperienced, may have. I started by including responses I got from a Facebook post, but for this to really work, I'd love to hear from all of you and how you work smarter, not harder! Let's help each other be more efficient in the classroom! You can share in the comments below or email me at kim@familyconsumersciences.com and I'll update the post as new information is shared. Additionally, if you have a burning question that you would like me to pose to other teachers, share the same way and I'll create a post.
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Food Influences Intro Group Activity to Culminating Home Scavenger Hunt Portfolio Project
Why do you eat what you eat? For some this is an easy question and for others it's a bit more complex. After all, there are many things that influence our food choices and they may be completely different from one person to the next! When I teach about food influences in the junior high, it's often one of my very first lessons with them. This introductory group activity is a great way to get students up, moving around and communicating with you and their peers right away. The middle of this lesson consists of an overview of the influences and application activity. Finally, the culminating project is a scavenger hunt portfolio that students complete outside of class and can be digitally or hand-generated but gets students sleuthing around their homes, looking for some of the influences as they relate to their own families.
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Kids in the Kitchen with Children’s Book Inspired Recipes: A Literary Feast!
It does my heart good to see young children helping out in the kitchen! Back in the olden days, children learned to help out in the kitchen and even cook and bake at a fairly early age. Today's children, not so much! One thing that I have noticed about my incoming 7th graders is that their culinary skills are severely lacking! Sadly, many students aren’t allowed in the kitchen to cook or experiment with food preparation, others simply can’t be bothered because “convenience” is easier and has become a way of life. Lastly, many may want to learn, but have no role models in their lives that can or will teach them as their parents and even grandparents just don’t cook! This lesson combines literacy and food prep as students learn the importance and benefits of why young children should be in the kitchen, helping to prepare foods with their parents. It also shows them how creating fun recipes can be an extension of the very books the children love to read. So, take literacy and food prep to a whole new level and show students how they can enjoy a literary feast!
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Teaching Employability Skills with “The Pursuit of Happyness” Movie
When I first started teaching about employability skills, my lesson was pretty dull, a real snoozer! Over the last few years, I've reworked the lesson to make it more interesting and engaging for my students. One of my all time favorite movies, The Pursuit of Happyness, is also incorporated into this lesson because it contains a ton of examples of employability skills in actiont! Check out the lesson below if you need to spice up your employability skills materials!
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HANGRY: A Healthy Eating Talking Points Activity
Have you ever needed a short activity to fill time due to a "surprise" assembly, early dismissal or one class finishing before another? This activity can be stretched or shortened depending on your needs! Hangry is a real concept that most of us have experienced at one time or another and because of this, it can be a very relatable topic for students to talk about and make connections to. I've included some activities that work well with this topic, so, pick and choose or do them all!
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Styles for Handling Conflict: Lesson & Activities
Conflicts exist everywhere: at home, at school and at work! No exemptions! However, just as the problems vary so do the ways ways that people may deal with them. Check out the interactive lesson below on how you can teach your students all about the various styles for handling conflict in both their personal and professional lives.
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Halloween Wars
Want a fun, creative and competitive way to incorporate Halloween themes into your foods class? Check out the project shared by Beth Beattie, a FCS teacher from Missouri who incorporates various parts of Halloween Wars into her Food Science class at Montgomery High School. It started as a way to showcase professions within the program and after viewing Halloween Wars, students decided they wanted to make it a competition!
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Characteristics of Development: Station Activities
After teaching about P.I.E.S: The Areas of Development, I move directly into the characteristics of development because they tend to go hand in hand. This concept seems to be a bit more difficult for my students to wrap their brains around, so to help them better understand, I have interactive stations set up throughout the room that they work through, completing activities that mirror each of the characteristics. Students must utilize their notes to help discern between the answers. Students enjoy completing the activities and after discussing correct responses and showing the connections, most students have an easier time with the practice scenarios that follow.
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#ShowMeYourOvernightOats
Oats are a staple most cooks cannot live without! How many other whole grains pack as much healthful variety into their product? The thing I love about oats is the fact that they can be customized in so many recipes from breakfast foods, baked goods, healthy snacks, and even used in place of bread crumbs when making things such as salmon patties or meatloaf! I wanted my students to see, taste and appreciate the goodness that oats have to offer so when I saw a YouTube ad by Quaker Oats promoting an oats contest, I knew how I wanted to incorporate this information into my grain unit. However, if you don't teach a unit specifically about grains, no worries as this can easily be incorporated into a breakfast or healthy snack unit!
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Digital Version: Human Reproduction & Anatomy Breakaway
Always wanted to do a breakout but didn't have the locks or boxes to do so? Now, thanks to Sahvanna Mease and Mary Mullikin of Colorado, you can do just that using Google Forms! How cool is that...less prep, less expense, but just as fun! Even cooler, the same materials are used as in the original version of Human Reproduction & Anatomy Breakaway! Thank you for the adaptations, ladies!
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Food Labeling Claims
Do you know the difference between a health claim and a nutrition claim? Most of my students don't! This lesson explores the difference between the two as well as why it is so important to understand what food labeling claims actually mean when reading a food label. This lesson includes some informative and creative activities, incorporating the information learned so that others might be enlightened.
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Celebrating Mister Rogers: The Man Behind the Neighborhood
I remember watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood on PBS when I was a child! I had no idea then that I would grow up and become a child development teacher, nor did I fully realize the influence and impact this man had on children's programming, education and development! The following lesson is a tribute to this man and contains a variety of activities that can be used all together or completed individually depending on your time and classes. Even if you don't use this lesson, I highly recommend watching the documentary "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" if you grew up with Mister Rogers like I did!
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Masks, True Identity & Healthy Relationships
It all started with a give away! Twisted Boards was giving away 3-D boards resembling masks. All I had to do was share back how I used them in my class. My students are still talking about this lesson...to me, to their peers and to other teachers! Since completing this lesson and project, I've seen a significant difference in my students as well. Many are coming out of their shells, volunteering to go first in oral presentations, sharing more about themselves and more importantly connecting the concepts to other lessons! Read on to see how I incorporated these masks/boards into my curriculum.
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