By: Grace Tuhy, DHS Senior Student
For the past three months I have been in an amazing program, work based learning, going into a classroom as a teachers aid at Dickinson Middle School. As a part of this experience I have been teaching lessons and assisting in lessons for 8th grade skills for daily living class.
When I would get to Dickinson Middle School in the morning I would start the day helping with doing little tasks before the students came to the class like printing papers, grading assignments, or getting our labs set up for the students. During the time that I was there the things I had the opportunities to assist with teaching about child development, sewing, food nutrition, and cooking.
During the child development portion of the class one lesson I came up with and taught on my own was a studying game for the students about different parts of children's development. This game consisted of them getting questions and every time a group would get one right they got to mark a spot on their bingo sheets and once a group got a bingo they won.
During the sewing portion of the class I assisted in teaching the students hand sewing and machine sewing. While doing sewing labs the students made their own personalized pillows which I assisted them on with any questions they had.
During the food nutrition portion of the class I taught a lesson about the food nutrition facts label, going through a food nutrition label and explaining what each of them do for your body and its nutritional value. I also assisted in a lab where students had to go through a line of objects like different cereal brands and guess their nutritional value.
During the cooking portion of the class I assisted in labs where students were in the kitchen cooking their own foods and learning from their mistakes. We also did a lab with different ways to measure ingredients and why we use certain measuring tools for different ingredients and the differences they all make.
The experience that I have had during work based learning has been amazing mostly because of the amazing teacher I was placed with, Mrs. Larsen has shared with me a lot of amazing experiences which I will never forget. I would highly recommend work based learning for everyone because of the amazing experiences I have shared with the students and teachers i worked with as well as the relationships created during my experience.