RICHMOND – Cal High students are helping bring a new way of learning to Cal’s sister school, Michelle Obama Elementary School in Richmond.
Students in Cal’s careers in teaching class volunteered on March 22 to travel to Michelle Obama Elementary to present lessons about economics to younger students through Junior Achievement, a non-profit global youth program.
Junior Achievement’s goal for this event was to offer young students the skill sets and knowledge for their future economic decisions to be successful.
Throughout past years, Cal’s careers in teaching class has been involved with this program, connecting high school students to elementary school students.
“Junior Achievement is a possibility for the people in the careers in teaching class to come over to Michelle Obama Elementary and be able to sort of shadow teach a class,” junior Brooke Hersch said. “We spend the whole day with the kids and we get to teach them various lessons that we’ve prepared for a month now.”
Each pair of Cal students were assigned to teach a lesson to a classroom of kindergarten to third grade students.
The lessons taught included teachings of wants versus needs, future careers, and money management, all guided by high school students. The lessons are specifically designed for students to become exposed to the world of global economics at a young age through simple curricula.
“We teach students about making choices and money and get them prepared for the future,” junior Alyssa Griffin said.
The Cal students are provided with an outline of what to present to their class, but they form their lessons to fit their own personal ways of teaching. Students said they prepared their lesson plans weeks in advance.
“We’ve been preparing putting together all of our lesson plans in class beforehand,” senior Alyssa Andrews said. “We have a little bit of a guide of what we’re supposed to be doing and then we have activities we set up beforehand and just little games for them to do in between to kind of keep them busy.”
Stacey Martin, Junior Achievement’s senior director of education, has helped coordinate teaching events between Cal and Michelle Obama Elementary students for years.
“We have high school students go to Michelle Obama Elementary school and teach Junior Achievement for the day,” Martin said.
She explained that the program being offered to Cal students under Junior Achievement is called High School Heroes, which allows students interested in pursuing a career in education to volunteer their time and skills to teach Junior Achievement’s economic curriculum to younger students.
Shanin McKavish, the teacher of the careers in teaching life skills class at Cal, has worked with Junior Achievement for many years, introducing her students to the world of classroom management and lesson planning.
McKavish said her class spent two months learning about lesson plans and how to apply those plans to a classroom before heading to Richmond.
“I expect [my students] to run a variety of activities or lessons, taking pretty much full ownership of running the classroom today,” McKavish said. “I hope they walk away with a feeling of successfully taking what they’ve learned all year and having applied that in a classroom [that] they’re almost solely in charge of.”
Michelle Obama Elementary fifth grade teacher Lisa Jako is familiar with her school’s connection with Cal and has looked forward to her students being immersed in a unique learning environment where high school students control the classrooms.
“I want [Michelle Obama students] to learn whatever content is being brought to the classrooms, I really also hope that they can learn some life skills from it,” Jako said. “They can gain some models for what [the future] could look like for them one day.”
Jako expressed the importance of young students being taught by older students, a sentiment that the Cal student volunteers have agreed with as mentors for the elementary school students.
“I think having a role model that’s closer to their age is super helpful because they can see something and have something to look forward to,” said Cal senior Wren Pinkela, who volunteered to teach students at Michelle Obama Elementary. “When I was a kid, I would always look up to my teachers. Now that I’m here, I’m hopefully inspiring other kids.”