Tag: Middle School

Food Influences Intro Group Activity to Culminating Home Scavenger Hunt Portfolio Project

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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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Fashion Styles Project

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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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Healthy & Positive T-Shirt Messages

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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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Caring for Children: Symbolism Stations

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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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Family Dinner Matters

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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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FCS Related Careers Game

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To help boost exposure and interest in FCS related careers, I developed this interactive game to help students explore careers and related careers within our field. This is an interactive, small group activity that can be very competitive and fun, especially for junior high level students! All you need are some dice, a game board and optional electronic devices.  This is a great activity to do when you need to fill a day before school breaks, between units or changing class rotations!

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Food Truck Resources

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Food Trucks have been quite popular for the last couple of years with no signs of this trend going by the wayside any time soon!  So if you’re like me and have always wanted to teach this, but didn’t have time to reinvent the wheel, look no further!  Below, you will find a plethora of resources for teaching this topic and project geared to every grade level.  It’s up to you to decide how far you want your students to go with it!

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Stoplight Foods & Jenga Review Game

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The stoplight is such a simple traffic device, but has a universal meaning to pedestrians and drivers in the world of transportation. You may also be familiar with this concept in the nutrition world as it was introduced a few years ago as “Go-Slow-Whoa” or “Stoplight Nutrition”. In order to reinforce healthy food choices, why not implement the universal meaning of the stoplight into an interactive Jenga game?  It’s a simple way to reinforce healthy food choices for all age groups.

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Age Appropriate Toys– Activity

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What child doesn’t like playing with toys?  When my children were young, they received a lot of toys from family and friends.  Some of those toys were appropriate and safe for their age and abilities and others were too advanced and were put back for a later time.  To some people, toys are toys and safety, age and ability play no part in their selection.  I like to provide my students with an overview of the types of toys recommended for each age and stage of a child’s early years.  After discussing some criteria to keep in mind, the best way to evaluate or analyze a toy for age appropriateness is to actually play with them. So, the toy stations go up and the big kids “play” and utilize their resources to help them determine the toy’s age/stage and justify their answer.  This is always a fun activity as students see and explore new toys they’ve never had or played with, along with reminiscing about those they did play with, as youngsters!   No toys?  No worries as I’ve included an alternate activity to accomplish the same thing!

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Teaching About Vegetables

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After teaching this unit last year, I knew I had to update my vegetable lessons and activities, especially since we are a 1:1 school with iPads!  So, I’ve spent the better part of six months trying to figure out how to make this unit more engaging, both with and without technology! I am super pleased with the results, as are my students!  These lessons focus on students’ preexisting knowledge of vegetables, the consumption of vegetables (habits as well as reasons to consume), nutritional value and subgroups and vegetable classifications. Because knife skills are used in the lab options, be sure to cover that information prior to the lab(s)

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