Lessons for Life Vol. 2 : Secondary Grades

For all school counselors and teachers of life skills courses, here is a complete K-12 career development curriculum packed with stimulating lessons and activities to help students develop the self-knowledge, interpersonal skills, and work habits they need for success in school, work and like, and learn how to make good decisions about their education, personal lives, and future careers.

The curriculum is organized into two spiral-bound grade-level volumes that fold flat for easy photocopying of the lesson materials:

• Volume 1: Elementary Grades (K-6)
• Volume 2: Secondary Grades (7-12)

Each level volume provides 60 age-appropriate lessons with related activities and worksheets that encourage students to examine themselves, their life roles, the relevance of their education, and factors that contribute to positive career choices. The lessons help students of all abilities:

• Develop self-knowledge
• Improve interpersonal skills
• Examine various life roles
• Practice assertiveness and acceptance
• Build employability skills
• Relate school to work/careers
• Set short- and long-term goals
• Explore different careers
• Make good decisions
• Plan ahead for both school and work

All lessons are presented on two facing pages — a left-hand Preview Page listing the lesson title, the career topics addressed, the skill-based objectives, and supplies needed (if any), and right-hand Lesson Page with introduction, focus, activity, closure, and follow-up activity. Many lessons also include a reproducible worksheet for use with individual students or an entire class. For example, you'll find:

• an Interpersonal Rating Sheet to be used by students in the interview/role-play activity with the lesson "Best Foot Forward" (Volume 1)
• Egg Pattern Cut-Outs, a worksheet used in the fingerprint activity for the self-concept lesson "I'm Something Special" (Volume 1)
• a Dear Editor Worksheet on which students rate the tolerance shown in letters to the editor of their local newspaper (Volume 2)
• the Personal Goal Worksheet, an educational development exercise in which children set short-term academic goals for themselves (Volume 1)
• a Seven Intelligences Sheet that students use to categorize the strength of famous personalities and themselves in the lesson "IQ-4-U" (volume 2)

In short, each LESSON FOR LIFE volume gives you all the basic components of an effective career guidance curriculum. The lessons can serve a complete developmental program in themselves or be used to supplement or enrich any career guidance program already in place.

Zark VanZandt, Ed.D., is a counselor educator at the University of Southern Maine at Gorham. He has served as both and elementary and a high school counselor, a director of guidance, and a state guidance consultant.

Bette Ann Buchan, M.Ed., is an elementary/middle school counselor at Woolwich (Maine) Central School and adjunct clinical supervisor of interns at the University of Southern Maine.