Skilling up Students with OHVA’s Career Kits 

It’s never too early to start dreaming of your future. As second and third-grade students begin the academic year at Ohio Virtual Academy (OHVA), a K12-powered school, they’ll have a unique way to explore potential career options: through hands-on career kits. 

These kits are part of “Skill Up OHVA,” the school’s innovative career tech program. Lauren Logan, OHVA’s career and college prep program director, was researching career-focused projects when she came across the idea. She quickly realized the kits would be a great way to spark curiosity in OHVA’s elementary-aged learners. 

The State of Ohio offers Career Exploration and Awareness Funds, which are administered by Career-Technical Planning Districts (CTPDs) to support career tech programming in schools. Lauren took her idea to the Penta County CTPD, who agreed to fund the initiative. 

Legos, Lesson Plans, and Slippery Slime 

Once funding was secured, Lauren and her team got to work building out the program. The first step to developing the kits was deciding what would go inside. After several conversations with OHVA’s elementary teachers, they landed on five focus areas: agriculture, healthcare, education, STEM, and general career exploration.  

Students will each receive one kit, which includes materials for an interactive activity to help them learn about possible career pathways.  

• The agriculture kit contains everything students need to grow a “tickle-me” plant — a sensitive plant that moves its leaves when touched. 
• The healthcare kit includes a scale model of a set of teeth and a two-minute egg timer, along with toothpaste, floss, and a toothbrush so that students can practice dental hygiene on the model and themselves. 
• The education kit features two sets of Legos and two lesson plans. Students will work through a completed lesson plan and Lego activity first. Then, they’ll design their own to teach to a sibling or peer. 
• The STEM kit has a make-your-own slime activity with enough materials to produce two batches of slippery slime. 
• The career exploration kit includes crayons and a coloring book highlighting different careers and examples of vocabulary students would learn and use in each role. 

Every kit comes with a handout with follow-along instructions for the activity and more information about jobs students could pursue within a particular sector.  

It Takes a Team 

The career-focused goodies weren’t the only benefit of OHVA’s kits. Through their conversations with elementary teachers, Lauren’s team identified an opportunity to send students home with the materials they’d need for reading, phonics, and writing exercises that follow the Orton-Gillingham method, which is widely used by Stride K12 teachers. They added index cards, crayons, dry-erase markers, sheet protectors, and a tactile mesh for tracing letters and words — all tools students will use in their literacy and phonics lessons. 

Each kit is packaged in a drawstring bag with the “Skill Up OHVA” logo and its tagline, “Find your passion. Plan your success. Own your future.” But stuffing 2,000 bags in just a couple of weeks is no small feat. To get the job done, Lauren and her team enlisted the help of OHVA’s elementary teachers, who spent a day packing kits with them over the summer. 

The finished career kits were distributed to teachers at all-school professional development sessions in August. They will share them with students at “Meet Your Teacher” and in-person testing events this fall.  

Sparking Curiosity 

For students, the career kits are just one step in a lifelong journey. The handouts in the kits highlight the extensive career tech programming that OHVA offers for elementary, middle, and high school students so families can take full advantage of these opportunities. 

Moving forward, Lauren hopes to expand on the initiative, using feedback from this pilot to design career kits that cater to fourth and fifth-grade students. For now, though, she’s just excited to get the kits into kids’ hands and homes. 

“Part of our goal in designing these kits was to bring awareness to the career tech programming we provide at OHVA,” she said. “But the deeper purpose was to spark curiosity in our students and allow them to start exploring possibilities for the future in an engaging and fun way. We’re so grateful to the state and district leaders who provided the funding to make this project a reality.” 

Ready to learn more about taking career-focused classes and exploring passions, all while earning a high school diploma? Visit our Career and College Prep page to learn more!