Life Knowledge Lesson at Cedar Crest!

To begin my Thanksgiving break, I got the opportunity to travel to my Cooperating Center to teach a lesson from the FFA Life Knowledge! I taught first period at Cedar Crest High School which is the Ag 4 class, of all seniors. After looking over the options for lesson topics, I decided to teach a lesson on First Impressions to this group of seniors. The main point that I wanted to get across was that people are making first impressions of us all of the time, and that we have to ensure that our best selves are being portrayed at all times. 

I started the lesson by asking the students where first impressions matter and they responded with in interviews, first day of school, and meeting new friends. I responded by saying that honestly, anywhere and anytime could be a first impression on someone. 

Their first task was to create a skit of first impressions. I created groups of 3 and 4, based on where the students were sitting in the classroom. I then assigned 2 groups to create bad impressions and 2 groups to create good impressions. Students really had fun with this, especially the bad impressions. This got them thinking of some of the things that you would want to include in a good first impression. We discussed these as a class and went through each skit, to determine what went well or not. After our discussion, I had a student be our scribe and we created a list of good and bad things to do in a first impression. I thought by having a student be the scribe, the rest of the students would maybe remember some of the lists and be able to use them in future situations. 

One of the things that students brought up was about a firm handshake. So, to test a students handshake, I had them line up and I went down the line and gave everyone a handshake. They found this very fun, but I also wanted them to pay attention to their handshake, as sometimes we may forget to make it a good one when meeting new people. 

To wrap up the class, students enjoyed watching some Interview fails on youtube. Some of these were very cringe, and again I wanted students to pick out things that they would remember in the future. I played 4 different 3 minute videos and we discussed them at the end. 

To wrap up class, I gave students a Student Satisfaction Survey, to see how they felt about the lesson. After I got finished, I realized that there were a few things that I could have changed to improve the class. One thing, is when we went through the skits, we did not discuss them after each of them went. This would have also helped my timing, if we had discuss them one at a time. 
Another thing is that the videos at the end really seemed like a filler and not all 4 of them were necessary. I realized as I started this lesson, that my timing was very off and I was not going to have enough content and activities for the day. I threw in the Handshake round, even though I did not have that in my original plan. 

Overall, the students had some good feedback with some small suggestions. Some of their feedback stated that this was very basic knowledge and that I could have gone more in-depth with this. My cooperating Teacher suggested to aim this lesson more towards everyday life first impressions instead of just interview first impressions. 

I think this lesson went okay, I was really glad to start getting to know students and their names. I did feel pretty comfortable in the classroom, so my goals to work on in student teaching is Timing and Knowledge of the topics!

Thanks for reading!
~Paige




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