Our grade three class recently completed their community unit in Social Studies. In this unit, we explored various dimensions of community building and identified that learning about yourself and where you want to see your community in the future is perhaps the most important step to choosing a career. A person should be able to identify and demonstrate how to choose a career that is in line with their interests and also beneficial for the greater community. Furthermore, one should be able to demonstrate an ability to identify and share personal strengths and characteristics and correlate them with how those qualities might impact their career paths. In this context, we conducted a final project called “When I Grow Up…”, where students were asked to think about careers and put forth thought-provoking questions for them to answer: What do you want to be? Why do you want to be it? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each option?
Students were asked to start working on their project, which culminated in a final presentation. This project integrated Social Studies with English and Computer Studies, as students were expected to work on their projects using Microsoft Word, learning in the process how to make their presentations ready using different approaches and practically got familiarity with basic research skills. Students were also asked to relate their Career Day presentations with a suitable Quranic verse and contemplate over its relevance. At the end of their project, they got an opportunity to present their work to different grades and displayed a lot of confidence.
To wrap up the “When I Grow Up…” project, we organized a Career Day on Monday January 23rd in which a guest speaker was invited from our own community. The guest speaker had a background in Mechatronics Engineering and gave a very beneficial presentation as students got an opportunity to see what it takes to get into the field, the discipline, and the learning habits required to succeed. They also learned about the building blocks of robots and got an opportunity to maneuver an actual robotic rover with a camera.