Recently in OLPC, we have been working on the beginning stages of our career lessons projects. The career category that I am researching is social studies. Some of the social studies related jobs that I am including are historians, anthropologists, urban planners, and cartographers. The goal of this project is to inform the kids about different career choices, but to do so in a way that is fun, creative, and easy to understand. In order to get a better idea of how to be successful with these lessons, we asked the 6th graders at CSG to give some input on a few unfinished projects. One suggestion that the 6th graders had was to use smaller words in order to maximize interest and understanding, and this is much harder than I originally anticipated because I have to find different ways to get my point across while still giving the same amount of information. By doing this, I feel like I am developing an important skill to have because not everyone thinks the same way, so being able to explain things in a different way for different people is crucial, especially with teaching little kids. I have a feeling that these career lessons will turn out great considering we all want them to be enjoyable and informative!
0 Comments
Recently in One Laptop Per Child, we began our career lessons, which are Etoys pages we will make including information about a specific occupation for the students in St. John and other areas to learn from. There are many career categories, from music and art to social studies. My career category is math, and I will research the job description, work environment, pay, and necessary skills of a statistician, mathematician, or surveyor with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (pictured below) and the Prospects website. With this information as well as feedback from the 6th graders at CSG, we will make fun, interesting, and informative lessons on each career category. Leading up to the career lessons, we learned about Etoys in OLPC and the different and creative ways we can make pages and booklets in the program. At first, I thought that Etoys was a little confusing and hard to understand and utilize, but as I became more familiar with the program, I learned about the different things you can do with it, like drawing and animation, and began to like the program more. I hope that our career lessons will be a success and people will be able to learn a lot about different occupations and have fun!
Since we had exams and then winter break, we haven’t had any class time in almost a month. In our last class before break, however, we all did the Hour of Code. The Hour of Code is a nationwide attempt to get young people more educated and excited about coding. The website code.org has many coding activities, several of which were similar to scratch and etoys, which we used throughout in the semester. The activity I tried with my partner was in order to make a flappy bird game, as seen below. On a different note, I’m getting very excited about the St. John trip in May. Right now, everyone must decide whether they’ll be traveling, and the whole trip seems a lot closer and ‘more real’ than before winter break. After teaching some of CSG’s students in December, I feel a little more prepared for the students in St. John, and I’m really starting to look forward to our trip.
|
During the school year, students will be blogging about their experiences approximately once a week. Please check back for updates.
Archives
April 2015
|