Career Day Ideas

Hi Gang,
Here are some cool ideas posted on the ASCA Scene blog for Elementary Career Days. I'd really like to try a few!

We have a Career Fair each year and have changed the format several times. What has worked best for us is to limit the fair to just fifth graders ( I also do career lessons in all the lower grades). We invite speakers to come in and give the kids a list. They choose their top 4 or 5, and we make up schedules. Speakers are sometimes parents and sometimes community people that we have invited/begged to participate.  We encourage speakers to bring hands on "tools of their trade" as much as possible so the kids can look and listen. The sessions are 25 minutes long, then we allow 5 minutes to rotate to their next session. All students are required to do an assignment about their top two sessions.


I have not tried this, but I heard about it and I’m anxious to try it out this Spring. It’s called Careers on Wheels. You ask community members to bring their trucks/cars/rigs that they use in their work. Then the kids rotate from vehicle to vehicle and learn about the careers. The ideas I have so far for my rural community are: police car, veterinarian’s truck, lineman’s cherry picker, tow truck, horse breeder’s trailer, military vehicles, and whatever else I can think of between now and then. It sounds like a great deal of fun with information sprinkled in.


What neat Ideas! when you said you wanted something to keep them focused while they rotate I thought you might have some kind of checklist or chart for them to take with them.  For my elementary kids I always asked the presenters to say something about the skills they need in their job (ie.. good with people, good at math, able to talk to people, writing skills, self control...) the kids could track the data for how many people said it was important in their jobs


We have a committee at my school that does Career Day for approximately 615 K-5 students on the last day of school each year. It is a wonderful. We have military, police, therapy dogs, horses, fireman,tae kwon do, etc. A lot of them bring vehicles and equipment. The kids and staff love it. There is no way I could accomplish something of this magnitude by myself, so I am very grateful that it is done by a committee.
another school in our district that is K-2 does a Career Day with vehicles, so they have firetrucks,police cars, motorcycle pol;ice, Ameren UE, ambulances,dump trucks & etc.