Middle School Workshops

On June 18, 2012, I attended two of the FACS professional development workshops held for middle school teachers. The first session focused on starting an FCCLA chapter in a middle school/junior high FACS classroom. The information was great, considering I did not know much about FCCLA and did not know how easy it would be to incorporate FCCLA into the curriculum I am already teaching. I do have to say that I was apprehensive at first, as it seemed to be a lot of work to get a chapter started. However, after Kathy Werner explained how easy the STAR events and National Program events fit into actual classroom curriculum, I became less worried. The main piece of advice I took from Kathy in this session was to just start small - take one STAR event and turn it into a classroom assessment. She emphasized only incorporating what you felt comfortable with at first and then you could change your ideas from year to year. I definitely learned how valuable FCCLA could be for many middle school students and want to give my students a chance to succeed in an area they never thought about before.

The second session I attended was regarding creating state standards for the FACS middle school programs in Colorado. This session was also extremely beneficial, as creating state standards for our middle schools would help to strengthen our programs and to make our programs more cohesive, as they are in the high school FACS area. The best part of this session was going over some of the middle school standards other states had already come up with in the FACS area. It gave us a starting point to go off of and made us realize we did not have to reinvent the wheel. We decided to use these other standards as a guide and to add/subtract whatever we wanted to make them fit with what we do in Colorado. I am truly excited to continue the work on these standards, as it will greatly benefit and strengthen all middle school programs in our state!