Career Lesson Series Part V: Borrowed Career Lessons

Welcome to the final post in my career lesson series! If you missed the first 4 parts, worry not! Links are below.

Since I’ve already written about the lessons I implement with 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 7th grade, you may be wondering about the lessons I use with my 1st, 3rd, and 4th graders. Those career lessons have been borrowed from other bloggers and are wonderful! Unfortunately, I was unable to find the original source for my 4th grade lesson because the link I have is now password protected, but I will still be sharing my borrowed 1st and 3rd grade career lessons!

1st Grade – Career Bingo

For my 1st grade career lesson, I use these bingo cards from Counselor Keri’s TPT Store.

We start off by talking about careers, then we play the bingo game. One of the first questions I always get is “Mrs. S, what do we get when we win bingo?!?” I tell the students, “You get something very exciting! When you get bingo for the first time, you can tell the whole class what you want to be when you grow up!” *Cue excited gasps from the 1st graders* {If only things like that worked in middle school.}

As each career is called out, we talk a little about what someone with that career actually does.

We play bingo until all of the careers have been called out and until every student gets blackout {so they keep the markers on their cards all the way through, but they only call out for their first time getting bingo}. Once the last career is called out, we do a 30 second “blackout bingo dance” as a class {aka the cutest thing ever to watch little 7 year olds dance their hearts out….sadly, some have better moves than I do on the dance floor.}

3rd Grade – Career Jeopardy

As I write this post, I am realizing that I didn’t exactly borrow this lesson from someone else, but rather I found the Career Jeopardy Game on Pinterest and incorporated it into my own lesson. Since the majority of the lesson is taken up by playing this game, I will give all credit to Minot Career and Technical Education. You can find a link to the game here.

This is probably my most popular career lesson. The 3rd grade students truly enjoy playing Jeopardy, and I even have 4th and 5th graders ask if they can play it again! In this career game, all of the Jeopardy categories are amounts of education or training needed for careers.

Just like with regular Jeopardy, the questions gets harder as the dollar amount increases. Also, as with regular Jeopardy, I have the students answer in the form of the question, and if they forget to say “What is…?” they actually lose the points/”money” {which makes them more aware of their words and the way they say things}.

The great thing about this game is that is has a mixture of traditional and non-traditional career choices, which means that students learn more about careers they have heard of and careers they never new existed.

Well, that’s a wrap, folks! This career lesson series is now complete, and I hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading!