Live your Dream Today,
the Fun and Educational Way!
The Curriculum Ideas on our site can be incorporated into your classroom, recess, free play, etc. to teach career education in a fun, innovative, and educational way. Activities listed are for ideas only and are not appropriate for all ages and may require adult supervision. Get creative and expand these ideas in your classroom or home to make work fun for kids of all ages. When you use these ideas with our books, the books show Katy and VJ doing many of these activities in one form or another and the book also shows them using things from around their house to pretend. The beauty of most of our ideas is that you don't have to buy anything, and if you do, it is minimal. Most activities can be completed using things from around the house. Kids enjoy making these tools themselves, it does not matter what they look like, it matters that they created them and that they use them. These ideas also help you recycle if your classroom or home is going green and you will finally have a use for all those left over fast food balloons that have lost their helium or those paper towel and toilet paper rolls that quickly fill up the trashcan.
Katy and VJ Dream about Jobs in Sports
Sporting Good Store Manager
* Take a field trip to a local sports store or department store and ask them for a tour of the sports equipment and arrange for each child to shop for some sports equipment with pretend money and check out at the real cash register.
* Give each child pretend money before they go out to recess. At recess, make a sports store out of the equipment and as children come to check out the equipment, let them practice their math skills with as they buy the equipment.
* Make a cash register our of a cardboard box and place it in the dramatic play center for children to play with during free time.
* Ask the kids to pretend they work in a sports store and they need to reorganize the shelves. Have them sort sports equipment into categories on a shelf by which items are round, long, can be caught, can be used to hit a ball with, go together to play a game, etc. Can use real equipment or pictures or words.
Sports Broadcaster
* Make headsets out of paper strips and round circles, affix a qtip, and you have a broadcast headset. Turn down the sound on a televised sports competition or send kids to recess to broadcast the action on the playground.
* Take a field trip to a sports game at your local high school and make arrangements with the broadcaster/ announcer to let each child take a turn on the microphone at some point during the game to describe what they saw during the play.
Athletic Trainer
* Make a first aid kit out of real or pretend supplies (toilet paper for bandages, address labels or stickers for bandaids, popsicle sticks for splints, etc.) During pe or recess instead of having them sit on the bench until it is their turn, let them pretend to have got hurt during the game and take turns wrapping each others legs, arms, etc.
* Play if you are happy and you know it but have kids wrap a body part each time you sing through the song with real or imaginary bandages to help them learn body part recognition.
* Go online and find diagrams of the skeletal system and a muscle chart and teach children the scientific names for what is under their skin.
Sports Photographer
* Use imaginary, pretend, broken, disposable, or digital cameras to take pictures of people on the playground who are playing sports. Try to capture them in action shots like kicking a ball, jumping up to shoot a basket, or reaching to catch a ball. Have a photo contest if you use real pictures and/or write a story about the photos you took as a sports journalist.
* Get copies of old sports illustrated, ESPN Magainzes, Sports Newspaper Articles, etc. and let children make a collage of sports photography. You can have them choose a topic like kicking, jumping, shooting, catching, etc. to learn about action words.
PE Teacher
* Let children take turns each day helping you plan the PE or outdoor play activities. Help them prepare an outline of activities they want their peers to do and make sure they know how to demonstrate each stretch, exercise, or game. Allowing them to be part of the process or to imitate a peer will help them stay motivated and excited. You can also let them play simon says as they instruct the kids in activities to make it even more fun.
* Let children take turns checking out the equipment each day at recess, checking it all back in, and putting it away.
* Ask children to invent a new game with the sports equipment you assign them. They will need to demonstrate it, write up rules for it, and help the class play it.
Sports Statistician
* Make a diagram with 4 circles. Give each child 4 turns to make a basket, shoot a goal, catch a ball, etc. and have them color a circle each time they made it and tell them how many times out of 5 they were successful.
* Older children can do the same above activity but with a lot more turns and they can even compare their records over time, to each other, or based on activity to learn how to order fractions. They can also turn their fractions into %, chart their results, etc
* Bring in a stack of baseball cards and let children compare and contrast stats for various players and try to identify which player has the best record for each thing.
More coming soon!