Week 2/3 Blog Post

THRIVE Director Notes

Posts on this Blog will be directed to help families see what is going on in our THRIVE Program.  Items discussed on the Blog have already occurred. To keep updated on what’s coming up please refer to your students or UCM activity calendar.

We had our first week of interviews last week.  

Due to family interviews, our students had alternative work for some of their classes.  This might’ve meant online or group work for some of the classes. We realize this might’ve caused some added stress for some of the students.  We’ll be working on helping them catch up early this week. We had some good interviews with potential students. We appreciated the students’ understanding during this time.  We’ll have another set of interviews in the last week of the month.

First-Year Students:

Workplace & Community Skills (Mrs. Southard & Dr. Manning): Monday class was cut short due to interviews for next year's cohort. Students were asked to email us five questions they could ask during their job shadowing. Students were assigned various places to go on campus to job shadow this week. Weekly point sheets were turned in Wednesday instead of Thursday due to interviews and possible bad weather. 

Even Snow and Chiefs’ parade doesn’t cancel classes on Wednesday...

Learning Strategies (Mrs. Southard): 

 Monday students were reminded of an assignment that was due Wednesday. Mrs. Southard demonstrated how to complete the assignment. Some students missed class on Monday because of Job Shadowing. Students were asked to email all of their instructors if they were to miss classes. Wednesday we moved the class meeting time to noon due to the bad weather. We covered the rest of the notes in Chapter 1 and students used guided to complete their power points. 

A few of our students doing homework in between classes.  Great job of staying on task and getting your work done.

Second-Year Students:

Transition Planning II (Dr. Manning):  We are discussing monthly budgets.  However, the students have run out of money to pay for everything that they want.  The students’ have to make some changes to their monthly budgets and cut some wants to be able to pay for their needs.  For Example, we talked about not needing the new phone that just came out, this may save some money to pay the utility bills.  Sometimes making choices is hard for everyone, especially, if the individual has never had to think about their income over their expenses.  Hopefully, the students are realizing that their wants might be something they need to plan ahead for and save some money for the wants.

Gary discussing upcoming items.  Also discussing monthly budgeting.

Internship II (Dr. Manning): Internships have gone well for the first couple of weeks.  Sometimes the internship may not be exactly what the student thought the internship would be but the students still can learn valuable skills during any internship.  These skills teach you to be flexible, be a team player, do a certain job you may not want to do but your supervisor has told you or asked you to do that certain job.  The students also have to realize that their internship hours/days may change throughout the semester. This helps our students with being flexible and adapting to change. Any internship/job/workplace environment can teach us positive and negative skills.  

Here’s one of our students at her internship:

PLATO (Mrs. Southard): Students had new assessments for the month of February. Some students were reminded through email to complete those. 

THRIVE Activities:

Claire had the students making Valentine’s Day cards for veterans.  

There are more pictures on our Facebook Page: 

Important upcoming dates:

Interviews for next year’s cohort of 2022:  Just FYI for parents.  During the last week of February, we’ll be having family interviews for next year’s cohort.  During this time some THRIVE classes may not meet. If we schedule an interview during class time the students will have group classwork to do during this week.  The teachers will make sure that the students are aware and each group will meet during the days that their class would’ve met. 

Athletics to watch:  Men’s and Women’s Basketball games are on.  UCM Mules Wrestling also has some matches in the coming weeks.  Towards the middle of March, the Baseball team will also start their games.  I’ve also copied activities to the students’ 2019 Activity Calendar (Google) that they can access and prepare for.

In addition, the students can participate in Intramural Athletics: Students will need to watch the back table for any upcoming activities.

"This blog is a programming blog written by the director and staff of the THRIVE Program on the University of Central Missouri campus.  This blog doesn't accept any form of cash advertising, sponsorship, or paid topic insertions. 

The views and ideas expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners.  This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.  We are simply telling you what we plan to do in our program and using the blog to help spread what we are doing on a weekly basis."