Wednesday & Thursday: Job Skills and Safety

Wednesday

I'm a little behind here on updates, as you can see from the date...

Wednesday was a day we focused on alphabetizing and categorizing.

Alphabetizing is very useful for jobs that involve sorting and organizing. The class has been practicing alphabetizing their chosen spelling words for the last few weeks, but I wanted to provide a real world example of when it is helpful to know how to alphabetize. I chose to use sortintg DVD's as an example of when a person would need to know how to alphabetize. In order to sort the DVD's alphabetically the class first had to categorize the DVD's. The class came up with a very healthy list of movie categories which they wrote on sheets of paper and then laid out on the floor. After the categories were decided on and laid out I passed out my entire personal DVD collection that I brought in from home. The class sorted the DVD's by category and then the alphabetized the collection in each category.

The class enjoyed the chance to rifle through my DVD collection and debating with each other to decide which category to place the DVD's in. I divided the class into two groups for this activity, one group was able to categorize and alphabetize the movies in less than 15 minutes, the second group took about 20-25 minutes with some aid. I found that about 90% of the movies were categorized accurately, but those movies were movies which tended to fall into 2-3 categories and depended on the person judging. I am happy to say there were not any errors when students alphabetized the movies, which shows me everyone understands alphabetizing well.

Thursday

Last week and this week the CLA portion of the class is focusing largely on safety and because my class also covers skills for work I wanted to spend some time in my class discussing safety also. I found an interesting way to combine science and fire safety on Thursday: homemade fire extinguishers.

I based me lesson based on a video by Champak SciQ. In the video Champak breaks down the 3 main needs of a fire: heat, fuiel, and Oxygen. I showed the video to the class first, after watching the video we reviewed what the 3 needed requirements of a fire were and then we discussed how the fire extinguisher can help to eliminate two out of the three parts of a fire. After the video we slowly got started working on our fire extinguishers. The fire extinguishers were made out of the following materials: a squirt water bottle, 1/4 cup water, 1/4 cup of vinegar, 1 tsp of baking soda, a 5 inch square of tissue paper, and a 9 inch piece of string. Directions ask that first you fill the water bottle up no more than half way with water and vinegar. After filling the water bottle you set the bottle aside and then you take the baking soda, spoon it into the center of the tissue paper square, next you roll up the tissue paper square into a small pouch, lastly you tie the piece of string around the pouch of baking soda.  After the pouch has been created and wrapped you slowly and carefully push the pouch into the water bottle without letting it drop into the bottle by holding onto the end of the string. Once the pouch is inside the bottle you screw the cap of the bottle on while securing the string.

The reason the fire extinguisher works on fire is because of the chemical reaction created when a water/vinegar solution come in contact with the baking soda. When the baking soda is mixed with the water/vinegar solution it creates a blast of Carbon Dioxide. Carbon Dioxide removes Oxygen from the fire, and the water lowers the temperature of the item on fire.

After creating our fire extinguishers we took one outside to test it out. As a class we established that while these fire extinguishers were interesting to make, they would not meet work safety standards because it takes too long for the tissue paper to dissolve and release the baking soda. Another student pointed out that the fire extinguishers themselves could be a workplace hazard due to the fact that they cannot be jostled too much or you risk setting the fire extinguisher off before it is needed. Overall I think the trainees showed an excellent understanding of safety based off of their evaluation of the fire extinguisher.

I found that 5 out of the 8 students needed or wanted help creating the fire extinguisher and others did a very good job following my verbal instructions. I felt at least 2 people in the room were capable of being more involved in the process, but they weren't interested in the project. In the future I will try to use more experiments that require more independent investigation so that the trainees can use less time following directions and more time working towards the solution themselves.  I do however think that it was good to use an experiment which required following directions because that is a valuable job skill which the class needs to practice with.