College and Career Awareness Day

I wanted to share something pretty cool that is going on in the school districts over here in the Pacific Northwest. On Wednesday, October 16, 2013 our school district, along with six other school districts (that’s over 275 schools) are participating in an event called DiscoverU. (We are actually doing our activities tomorrow though because of scheduling.)

The focus of this event is to get students thinking about their futures and increase their college/career knowledge. Every level at our district is going to be participating, elementary, middle and high school. There are three basic parts to this event.

.1. Staff dress and promote various colleges (I will be spreading my University of Idaho gold and silver all over the place!)

.2. Educators share their education or career pathway. My mentor teacher and I did a mini version of this earlier in the year but we will go a bit more in depth this time around. Because I am not technically done with college, I will be adding a little twist tot this. Since the first week of school, the kids have been asking tons of questions about what happens when I leave their classroom at the end of my student teaching. I am going to take this chance to talk about my journey with them and answer their questions.

.3. Students participate in a variety of mini exploration activities throughout the school day. Check out the DiscoverU website if you’d like some ideas to use in your own classroom. We have a few college and career themed activities we plan on incorporating during our day.

The biggest portion of our day is a mini presentation I am going to give the students and then they will create a short writing activity piece. Last week one of their vocabulary words in our ELA unit was college so this ties in really well. We are going to review what college is and some of the ideas students generated about it last week including colleges they know of and what kind of jobs require college. I also have plenty of images to show of my campus and UW/WSU campuses. We will then do something similar with trade schools and the military. We'll talk about what kind of jobs people do with both options and I'll provide lots of images to go with.

Afterwards each student will get to chose one of the options (college, trade school, or military) and write about what their life would look like in 10 years if they join the military, go to college, or go to a trade school.

Take a peak at a couple pieces of my set up for the day:

Students will be bombard with Class of 2023 signs. Can you believe it? Class of 2023. It just sounds crazy! 

They will get their picture taken in front of our graduation wall wearing a graduation cap! I have a cute idea to combine these images with their writing piece to create a cute keepsake for parents. 

Had to show off a little bit of my Cougar and Vandal gear! Gotta love the Palouse schools! I also have a piece of Vandal candy to hand out at the end of the day.

More to come tomorrow after all the festivities and fun. Does your school or class do anything to promote college and career after high school?