Building a solid foundation for College & Career Readiness is extremely important. If we start teaching these key skills as young as possible, students start realizing they can contribute to something much bigger than themselves. This is key to building a solid community of responsible people. The list below describes 8 key concepts to work on throughout the elementary years. Each one builds on the other, so by the end of the list, students should have a very solid understanding of how they can connect to the world of work! PLUS… see how I use my NEW tech savvy career resource! Be ready to blow your colleagues away with this awesome project!

Recognize Likes, Dislikes, & Strengths

Students need to realize what they enjoy doing and what they do not enjoy doing. Of course, with elementary students, this is going to change! These interests are not set in stone… we know their personalities are molding and changing as they get older. However, the idea behind this is to let them understand the things they like CAN connect to what they do in their job. Also, empowering students to use what strengths they have. In Kindergarten, this looks like letting an outgoing, friendly student be the classroom greater or a student who is interested in animals be responsible for the classroom pet.

Recognize ALL Work is Important

When students recognize that ALL work is important, they can broaden their view of career choices when they get older. We need to make sure and value each and every job because it contributes to society as a whole. In elementary this might look like celebrating the different jobs within the building. We have a “Gratitude Group” that celebrates the cooks, bus drivers, custodians, teachers, para-educators, etc. This way students learn to value all the jobs at school and how they work together to make our school run smoothly.

Identify Roles of Work at Home, School & Community

Branching outside of the school building can be another eye opener for some students. As they get older, they start to recognize what goes on a school and who does what responsibility. However, when we connect home, school & community responsibilities they realize the things they are learning at school, can in fact be used at home and in the community.

Responsibilities & Work Habits Needed to be a Good Worker

Along with the roles people play in the community, students need to understand the responsibilities it takes to be a good worker. In elementary, their job is to be a student. So, teaching them that being a responsible student will help them be a responsible adult. In elementary this looks like teaching them about how to have a successful school year and practicing what a responsible student does in order to be successful. Some character traits that connect with this theme are responsibility, perseverance, grit, growth mindset, etc.

Setting Short & Long Term Goals

As students get older, they can start practicing setting goals for their future. I have found that students can easily tell me a long term goal, but some of them struggle with breaking the long term goal down into short term goals. If we teach them to chunk their goals into manageable pieces it won’t seem so overwhelming. This may look like taking a classroom project and breaking it down into manageable pieces. This is an easy lesson to use with Habit 2 of teaching the Leader in Me.

Identify & Research Different Career Paths

One of the obvious things students need to start doing is researching different career paths or clusters. I do this differently at every grade level. I want students to have a solid foundation of the previous key elements before we dig deeper into research. At the early childhood level, we do a lot of identifying careers and talking about how they may relate to each other. With the upper elementary classes, we actually do research based on our interests. You can find my interest survey here Career Interest Survey.

Also, keep reading to find out how we use a tech savvy project to dive deeper into the understanding of the career paths! In this project we learn what different workers do, what education is needed in each path and learn to connect interests to different career paths.

Identify Parts of a Portfolio & Parts of a Job Application

The last part we cover in elementary is what a portfolio and job application are and why they would be important. Some teachers have classroom job applications and I have a Career Council Application. So, students are connecting to real-life job applications to what they already know in our school building. This is an important driving piece because they learn  that when they are being a responsible, hard worker they can showcase their hard work in their portfolio or on their application. It’s fun to let students have time to create portfolios (or a simple fold-able, called a portfolio) and let them express their strengths as a person.

Upper Elementary Research Project

**UPDATE: Due to HP Reveal App not working…

This project is on hold! I will update as the situation is resolved.

I wanted to have a project for my upper elementary students that not only engaged them but showcased their research in order to share it with others. I decided to do a REALLY COOL, tech savvy project that the kids actually got excited about!

Click the picture to find out how…

     

We used a TON of technology to bring excitement about research! We divided up into 6 stations and each had a career poster and cell phone. Using the HP Reveal App, the students scanned the posters and listened to the video about that career cluster/path. While they were listening, they were taking notes on their career research page. Once they were finished they had a good idea of all six career clusters and had an idea of which one fits their skills and interests. During my next visit to their classroom we dug into their favorite cluster a little more and used seesaw.com to do student presentations!

This was such a fun activity and I can’t wait to set up a virtual career fair with the students presentations! 🙂 Be sure to follow my instagram for updates on this cool activity.

I hope you we able to connect to some of these key elements on building College & Career Readiness with students! There are so many avenues for this. I would love to see how you are building these strengths in your buildings!