Day Four

On Tuesday we went to the library and Earth Fare.

I have never been inside Earth Fare and I was very surprised to see all of the products it has to offer and so were the trainees. Two trainees took the initiative to ask store employees about their jobs and what they do and one of the two asked for and received a job application. I wasn't able to use the evaluation forms I created due to a printer problem, but maybe next time.

The library was a great experience for everyone except maybe the librarians who were not expecting to help 7 people locate the books each person came in with. In the future I'm going to set  a book limit so that we can avoid this problem. While the class was there one trainee noticed that the library was offering its yearly summer reading program and suggested the class do it and I completely agreed with him.

After we came back from the outing we played some online math games. The math games, like the Arc staff person pointed out, kind of jump around from skill to skill. The jumpy nature of the games makes them fun games to play, but not good for tracking progress or going in order. This makes me think I need to rely on Khan Academy a little more, I have a class set up on Khan but I haven't been using it lately. I have nothing against Khan, but I forget to use it because we, as a class, spend so much time working in our workbooks and on worksheets that I've been hesitant to overwhelm them. I know I can fix this problem by budgeting my time better and possibly dividing the class in half between workbooks/worksheets and Khan and then switching.

After class I spent 2 hours fiddling around online looking for ideas to teach the soft skills portion of the class. I'm in a constant battle with myself trying to decide how much of the class should be geared towards H.S.E. skills and how much of the class should be devoted to employment skills. I found a pdf. online previewing curriculum which is written to help students develop skills in four job areas: clerical, retail, food service, and grocery. I read through the teacher's manual and it looks very good  for several reasons:

1. It includes differentiation.
2. The curriculum has evaluations the teacher can adjust.
3. The lessons are centered towards specific jobs.

My only beef with the curriculum is that it only focuses on 4 specific types of jobs. I don't want to box the trainees in and limit them to only 4 types of jobs. I'm stuck between this curriculum and a much pricier curriculum which focuses not only on jobs but daily living skills, interpersonal skills, and employability skills. The second curriculum is backed by a notable organization as well, but it is very expensive so I'm thinking very carefully before I make my final decision.

That's it for day 4.