Career Dreaming

March 31st is Career Day at Red Hill. While this is our Spirit Day to celebrate the food drive efforts, I have been focusing on Careers in Guidance this month.  In elementary school, Career Guidance is not so much about asking students to define their career path, but to develop those all important work success skills, get to know themselves – their interests, skills, passions, learning styles…,  and get exposure to careers they might not even know exist.

With RHU (and 5th graders at Murray), we are working on the Color Quiz.  It’s an elementary friendly version of the Meyers-Briggs – an inventory that helps define their personality type.  We are discovering strengths they have and looking at careers that align with those strengths. It’s been fun to watch them really think and reflect on themselves as they answer the questions. we then took the information and created resumes for their dream jobs.

With 2-3,  we created maps to our future.  We looked at subjects we enjoy at Red Hill, activities we might want to do at Walton, and things we'd like to learn more about at Monticello.  Then we talked about college and all the choices we get about where we go and what we study.  We brainstormed careers that match our interests and passions and ended our map at a possible career goal.

With K-1, we read a book from Julia Cook, one of our favorite authors - What Shoes Will You Wear? 2 kids explore different shoes, imagine themselves wearing them and thinking about what job they’ll be doing. Kids drew pictures of themselves in their future work shoes. Kindergartners at Murray read Clothesline Clues to Jobs People Do  and we had some similar conversation.

I can’t wait to see all the fun outfits in a couple weeks and am encouraging the kids to Dream Big! Last year we used the song Career Day as our theme. Kids enjoyed the video.  You can check it out here. This year I will be creating our own Career Day photos. I hope to unveil them next week. Stay tuned!