Category: Life Skills

#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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Coping Skills Toolbox

If you teach about crisis or mental illness, then this culminating activity shared by Michelle Overman, a FACS teacher from Greenville Central High School, Indiana, is one for your “tool belt”.  Below you will find a variety of activities that Michelle uses when teaching this topic to her Human Development class with some additional ones that I’ve added.

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Young Children & Screens

Several months ago a Texas FACS teacher, sent me a message suggesting that I create a lesson on this topic. I loved the idea and immediately had ideas swirling in my head.  However, before sharing, I  wanted to try it out with my own child development students to make sure everything went as I envisioned. Thankfully, The lesson and activities went according to plan and students had a lot to say about this topic and some great discussions ensued!  If you have suggestions for future lesson and/or activities, send me a message and I’ll take a look!

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