PROFESSIONAL
Rigor, Relevance, & Relationships
Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) is a dynamic and effective national student organization that helps young men and women become leaders and address important personal, family, work, and societal issues through Family and Consumer Sciences Education. FCCLA has more than 220,000 members and nearly 7,000 chapters from 50 state associations, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The organization has involved more than 10 million youth since its founding in 1945.
As an educator, you can enlist the help of FCCLA to encourage, motivate, and teach your students. When you integrate FCCLA activities into your class curriculum, you have the opportunity to use the organization's resources to complement classroom learning, providing projects and ideas that are initiated, developed, and evaluated by your students. One recent FCCLA project involved middle school students creating "welcome bags" for new students. Students worked with their school guidance counselors to determine information that would be helpful to new students entering the school. They constructed cloth bags in their clothing/textile classes and filled the bags with healthful snacks and materials on good nutrition. Once the welcome bags were completed, the FCCLA chapter hosted a welcome breakfast for new students and distributed the bags. Organization members followed up by volunteering as tour guides for the newcomers.
This project not only provided this school's students with timely and valuable nutrition information, but also encouraged collaboration and relationship building within peer groups and between the school and the community—all while meeting qualifications for the FCCLA Student Body program. Such activities present natural ways to incorporate multiple FACS subjects or classes, and the ideas are proving to be as limitless as students' imaginations.
To give you the full benefit of FCCLA as a resource, Glencoe has begun to include FCCLA activities within our programs. Look for these activities in our newest teacher editions. For more information about FCCLA, visit the Web site at www.fcclainc.org.
