Tips for having a Take Your Son/Daughter to Work day.
This was the third year that I help organize the "Take your Son/Daughter to work day." It a great program that helps your children understand what their parents do at work all day. This is sponsored in part by the Take you Son and Daughter to Work foundation.
Planning
About a month before the day, we sent out invitations to parents to let them know of the event. We asked their age and if they had any special allergies. We followed up with an additional email a week before the event.
The most common feed back that I got was "why was this during a school time?" Wouldn't it make more sense to do it during school vacation week?
From the foundation:
Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work(R) Day is organized during the school year so girls and boys can take what they learn in workplaces on Thursday and apply it to the classroom on Friday. By involving whole communities--schools, girls and boys, parents, workplaces, and mentors--the program helps young people make connections between what they learn in school and their future goals.
Activities
Here are some of the activities that we had planned:
Younger Kids
- Color in the Company Logo
- Where are we on the city map? What are we near?
- Word Matching (Name to Logo) - How well do you know your logos?
- Create your Dream Job - What do you want to be when you grow up and why?
- What would your Work Desk look like?
- iPiggiBank - "Allowance is serious kid business"
- A-Z Office Wordlist - A scavenger hunt to find things that matches a letter of the alphabet.
Older Kids
- What do you think our logo should look like?
- How do you think we do to help other companies?
- Brainstorming Activity: What is your Dream Job?
- What skills will you need to do your dream job?
- Job Matching Quiz - Match the job title with the picture.
- "The Future is Me" - Write the headline of something you wish to accomplish someday
- iPiggiBank - "Allowance is serious kid business"
- A-Z Office Wordlist - A scavenger hunt to find things that matches a letter of the alphabet.
Some Lessons Learned
- Anything younger than 7 is non-productivity. Kids are just running around. Keep activities short and interesting.
- Have lots of snacks for the kids and their parents. There are plenty of healthy allergy free snacks
- I saw some business having matching color shirts for the kids. This was a great idea.
- Enlist people that were teachers as volunteers.
- We had a Parents Panel that was useful for the kids to learn what their parents do to help the business.
- We asked kids to bring in their favorite toy for a show and tell.
- When kids arrived we made them make there own name tags
- Some companies split up the age groups. We didn't have enough kids to do that, so we tried activities that everyone would enjoy
- If your building has security in the lobby, check with them on the procedure for bringing kids to the office.
- Part of the building was having a fire drill. We made sure that the kids were always in an area where a drill wasn't going to happen.
- If you have water cups in the kitchen, make sure that things are reachable.
- Paper Airplane activity was a big hit as kids worked hard to build a paper airplane that would fly the furthest.
- The final activity of the day was to have the kids plan for next year event. It was a fun way for the volunteers to see what the kids liked the most.