2. Exploring different kinds of work
Hearing from others how they do their different activities can help your pupils understand what variety of jobs there are and what they would like to do themselves. Inviting a guest to talk to them about what they do can help pupils understand how a particular kind of work is done. Taking pupils outside school will excite and motivate them and give real weight to how they see many jobs.
Key Resource: Using the local community/environment as a resource [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] provides guidelines on inviting visitors to your classroom.
Case Study 2: Talking about work and employment
To help her pupils develop the concepts of work and employment, and understand the importance of work, Standard 5 teacher Aisha talked to her pupils about work and the future. She found that most of her class wanted to go to university so that they could get good jobs and earn lots of money. Most of them wanted to move to the city.
To show her pupils real-life experiences, Aisha invited a local shopkeeper to come to the school and tell the pupils how he started his business. They learned that starting a shop and running it involves hard work. It also needs money; he got a loan from the government to start his business. He had paid back nearly all of his loan and would soon own his business.
Aisha also invited a friend of hers, Anyango, who used to live in their village but had gone to university and now worked in a bank in the city. Anyango explained that she had always wanted to work in a bank and she had studied hard to become an accountant.
After the visits, the class held a debate on whether it is better to stay in your village and run your own business or to go to university and get a job. The class had learned much about how work and employment were related to their efforts at school and in the wider community.
Activity 2: Visiting a local business
Take your class (or in smaller groups, in turns) to a local market and let them see what happens there. Pair the pupils carefully to make sure they stay focused on the task and do not get distracted while out of school. Prepare for the activity by arranging with some of the market traders to answer some questions from the pupils about their business. You will need to prepare a worksheet/questionnaire for your pupils (see Resource 2: Worksheet for the visit to the market). If you do not have the resources to make a worksheet, then in the previous lesson write some questions on the board and ask the pupils to copy them into their books – leaving spaces for the answers they will get at the market. Also, ask the pupils what they want to find out and add these questions to the list.
If you think it is more appropriate, you could take the class to a local bank or other place of employment, but you will still need to plan this and have some questions or tasks for them to do or ask when there. After the visit, the pupils can write up and/or discuss what they learned about work. Summarise these thoughts on the board.
1. Using group work and pair work to explore employment