Students at Leeds Middle School get ahead of the game in exploring future careers thanks to teachers like Heather Williams and James Malinoski.Williams teaches computer keyboarding to sixth-graders and PowerPoint and Excel to seventh- and eighth-graders. She will be teaching them how to do some basic programming in HTML at the start of the year, which will build up to a project to make a new school Web site using Dreamweaver software.
“We do a weeklong project on careers,” Williams said. “It gives them an opportunity to see what they might be interested in for a future career.”
Malinoski’s class delves deeper into potential career choices. Students in the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grades have 12 modules during the school year with career interests such as robotics, weather science, pneumatics, photography, aviation, computer-aided design and drafting, and automation control.
This is the second year Malinoski has been teaching the class.
Students from both classes recently took a tour of the Honda plant in Lincoln. The students saw people in various careers at work at the plant, from legal representatives to robotics experts.
“It gives them ideas of what’s available to them. When we went on the tour, it gave them an idea of what it was like in a factory,” Malinoski said. “They learned by seeing how things like robotics work in a factory.”
“It’s like its own little city,” Williams said. “There is a wide range of education backgrounds there. There’s something for everyone.”
Williams and Malinoski attended the What’s Up in Factories 2006 workshop, which included tours for teachers and students.
“The workshop showed us how to integrate stuff we learned in the workshop into the classroom,” Williams said.
Honda Manufacturing of Alabama presented the teachers with a check for $581 after the workshop.
