Working with students

Career worm

Purpose

The purpose of this activity is to share students’ knowledge of jobs they know about. In this activity students try to match the last and first letters of consecutive job names.

Structure: small groups
Duration: as long as you want, or for as long as the class enjoys it
Resources: large pieces of paper and pens, especially if you want to display the results, alphabet flashcards (optional), list of job names (optional). Note that a lot of job names end in ‘r’ so your list could contain a good number of names that start with ‘r’.

Instructions

Divide students into groups.
Pick a letter of the alphabet. Either give all groups the same letter or a different letter.
Explain to the groups that the task is to think of a job that starts with the letter they have and write that down. When they have done that, they need to think of a job that starts with the last letter of their first job, and so on. Give them a time limit.
You can give some or all groups the list of job names if they are finding it hard to come up with names themselves.
Declare the longest worm the winner, or reward all results.
Positively reward all students for effort, no matter how long their worms.

Variations

Reward the best looking worms.
Make a class worm by joining all the worms together (students may need to think of an extra job or jobs to join their worm to the start of the next one).
Use another long animal (eg, snake, eel).