Career Day Fun!

We had our elementary career day on Friday at my school. It was a super fun day! I was very disappointed that I couldn't be there, but, my daughter had a procedure that prevented me from being there. Here's a run down of some of the fun things we did in our building. Hopefully, you can get some ideas for your career day from us!

Guest speakers - most of our grade levels recruited guest speakers to come in and visit with their students about their careers. Some grade levels spent the afternoon listening to many different speakers and our younger grades focused on just one or two speakers. We had a great variety of people from various clusters.

Dress up day - students were given the opportunity to dress up like what they wanted to be when they grow up.

Parent questionnaire - students were given a questionnaire to take home and interview a parent or family member about their career. These were used in various ways in classrooms during the week of career day.

Snowmen on parade - students were given a template of a snowman. They were to decorate it like a career they'd like to someday have.

Bulletin boards -
I worked with teachers to create two bulletin boards for the students to enjoy before, during, and after career day. One highlighted our educators in the careers they would have if they could not be educators. I titled this board "Career Day - I Could Be A..." The kids and teachers loved this board. It is outside our gym/lunchroom and has been enjoyed by many! Some of our grade levels decided to do these little guys with their kids also.

And lastly, I polled teachers to see what colleges/universities they had attended. I compiled this information and put it in a "bar graph" on the wall. This proved more challenging than I thought because we really don't have bulletin boards. This was done on the wall and on roll paper and then duct taped up to the wall (I know...pretty fancy, huh!)

Kids loved this as well and this was a wonderful opportunity for teachers to share with their students what it is like to go to college, why they went to more than one college, and incorporate some math skills as well while comparing and contrasting teachers and looking at this information in bar graph form. I'm planning to tie this board in to National Counselor Week as well by having a "College and Career Day" this coming week and having staff wear their "college gear" one day during the week.

 This is our college board...We took pictures of the staff (the same ones we used for the board above) and taped them to the paper...Then I used google images to make the college logos that are along the bottom of the graph. I backed these on black paper and laminated them so I could use them again. Then we just found some logos and clipart and added them to the rest to fill it in!

Here's a close up of the logos...

That's a quick summary of just some of the things we did for career day. In addition to all of this, our teachers planned fun activities for their grade levels to do throughout the day. This day would NOT have been successful without the hard work of the career day planning team and all of our teachers who did many things to make it a hit!