**ALL COMMON CORE***
THIS MEGA, MEGA BUNDLE FOR BACK TO SCHOOL Business soft skills are crucial for students and people to consistently use on daily basis. Plus, you will receive an extra TYPING TO THE TOP lesson.
TIME MANAGEMENT DESERT ISLAND ACTIVITY
Students will become familiar with using their time wisely as they experience this exciting and fun activity. They will have 4 rubrics to set the expectation. Students will be placed in groups of 3 to work together and accomplish the tasks that are asked of them. This lesson is one of my students favorite and they obtain a tremendous amount of group social skills and overall time management knowledge.
TIME MANAGEMENT WEEKLY PLANNER
Students will create and use a Weekly Organizer, and reflect on whether their time management improves over the course of one week of carefully tracking and scheduling their time. You can have students create their Weekly Organizer during one
class period, preferably on a Friday, then require them to show you their planner every day for the following week while you move on to subsequent lessons.
You can also make the weekly planner a homework grade to analyze and observe their activity throughout the week. Once students complete this lesson, they become more aware of managing their time more effectively and begin to prioritize the important tasks that need to be completed.
ORGANIZATION BINDER
Why Organization Matters You must get organized and stay organized in order to prepare for the professional world. Imagine your supervisor requests a form without warning—you will be expected to access it immediately. Or a colleague might require a piece of work to contribute to a project, and you will need to find it in a timely manner to contribute to the project’s success. At any time, you or a coworker may need to access financial data, emails, correspondences, transactions, bills, contracts, or any number of business records. It only takes a few minutes a day to maintain good organization both at home and in the workplace.
ACTIVE LISTENING
Students will learn the fundamentals of active listening, which includes not only hearing, but acknowledging the speaker, showing attentive body language, providing feedback, staying open-minded, demonstrating understanding, and responding appropriately.
Students will begin by defining “active listening,” then move into a series of fun and engaging exercises and group activities to test their active listening, demonstrate the challenges of active listening, and provide opportunities to develop and practice more effective listening in various situations.
LEADERSHIP
This lesson focuses on the skill of Leadership, which actually involves several different skill sets. Effective leaders possess strong communication, empathy, collaboration, listening, humor, and many other qualities necessary to command attention, delegate responsibility, set strategic vision, give feedback, manage teams, and take responsibility.
Students will define and write about their favorite leader. Not everyone is a natural leader, and everyone has a different leadership style. Students are not encouraged to all become one image of a leader. Instead, they will explore and test their personality traits, character tendencies, strengths, and fears, to better understand themselves and thereby adapt to leadership situations and demands.
PROBLEM SOLVING
Unit D focuses students on how to engage in the process of problem solving, with an emphasis on the multi-step process it takes to truly understand and attempt to solve a problem. Students will be asked to slow down and approach a problem with a 4-step methodology: defining the problem, generating alternative solutions, evaluating solutions, and implementing a solution.
Each lesson will focus on one of the four steps, providing guided practice, discussion, and reflection on each.
The major assignment of Unit D is a PowerPoint presentation slide show with scripted notes.
Students will again work in groups to practice leadership and teamwork skills. They will work together to create a presentation on any Business Soft Skill they have learned so far, including Problem Solving. Unit D Lesson 31 will introduce the basics of building a PowerPoint presentation, creating balanced, visually appealing slides, and using every slide during the presentation.
Exploring the soft skill of Problem Solving will require many scenarios for students to examine, analyze, and practice on. Depending on your students and school, you may choose to bring in additional, real scenarios for students to encounter, whether from local news, world news, or your students’ lives. The more relatable and the more detailed a scenario, the better practice it will provide students, and the more transferable the skills they will gain.
The goal of Unit D is for students to practice critical thinking, logic, common sense, and analysis when
 
TAKING NOTES
Taking notes is a crucial part of any learning. No one can remember, process, analyze, and use everything they hear. We need notes to help us work with information, especially if it’s new. Also, the act of writing is a way to learn. Writing down ideas and information, even if it’s facts you already know, helps your body and brain retain information better.
You will learn about a proven note-taking method that will give you thorough, helpful notes that you can actually use to help you remember information and connect ideas.
HOW TO CONDUCT A SUCCESSFUL MEETING
There are a lot of life skills that are not being taught in the classroom and understanding how to effectively plan, organize and execute a meeting is crucial for a student’s future.
There are 3 lessons that will provide you the opportunity to teach students to demonstrating effective and efficient meetings in any life setting.
As technology has changed and people can connect online or by phone, meetings can take place with people in different locations. The main goal of a meeting is to share information with people and to discuss matters and see the response of people or employees. Information can be shared by telephone and video conference calls, letter, e-mail, voice mail, text message etc., but having a live discussion with people provides a different response which includes body language and other personal factors.
WEEKLY KEYBOARDING
Students will complete weekly typing exercises to increase their speed, accuracy, and ability to touch-type. Use a website like keyhero.com or keybr.com to test students and track their speed and accuracy.
HOMEWORK WORKSHEET
You can set the number of minutes you want students to type, or the number of typing tests you want them to take online. You can also set the website they use, and how many days per week you want them to do their Keyboarding homework. Once they finish their assigned typing, they should PRINT the website’s results page that show 1) the date and time; 2) their speed, accuracy, and test results.
WHY KEYBOARDING MATTERS
In our world of digital communication, students need to type quickly and accurately in order to be seen as a professional. Hunting-and-pecking does not play well in the professional world. This is a skill built up over time, and with lots of practice to develop muscle memory. You can make it fun by playing music, holding contests, or using other incentives. You can also use this activity to re-focus students between lessons, or provide a needed break from an activity.