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• Arthur - "My Dad, the Garbage Man"
  Mr. Ratburn's class is taking field trips to visit parents at their jobs. After visiting Muffy's dad at Crosswire's Motors and Brain's mom at the Ice Cream Shop, Francine's not sure she wants the class to know her dad is a GARBAGE MAN. But, Francine soon learns that her dad is the coolest-- just as she had always thought!
• Caillou - "When I Grow Up"
  The house wakes up late, and that means it's a mad rush to get Mommy off to work. Later, when Caillou goes for a walk with Daddy he meets all kinds of people doing all kinds of jobs--and he gets to try being a mailman, a sanitation engineer and a policeman for himself. The best part? When he makes the lights and siren goes off in the police car!

Do in Class

• Arthur: Occupations - Design costumes to go with students' potential career choices.
• Arthur: Restaurant - List the supplies you would need to run a restaurant, gather props and create menus with pictures of food items. Take turns role-playing waiters and customers in a make-believe restaurant.
• Berenstain Bears: Going To Work - Discuss feelings children have about parents going to work. (Section 2)
• Berenstain Bears: I Wanna Be... - Conduct interviews with family members about their jobs. (Section 3)
• Maya & Miguel: What's My Job? - Play a game that introduces various professions.
• Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Neighborhood Helpers - Identify jobs that help others. Develop awareness of how different jobs and roles are important in the community.
• ZOOM: Flight - Fortune Teller - Play this fun game to find out what job you might have in the future.

Play Online

• American Experience: Wayback - BUZZ - Meet Bhavjit Ghumman, a plastics engineer. (Advanced Activity)
• American Experience: Wayback - What's Your Racket? - Take this quiz to find out about a few jobs from the past, present, and future that line up with some of your interests. (Advanced Activity)
• The Democracy Project: President for a Day - Find out if being the president of the United States is the job for you. (Advanced Activity)
• Dragonfly TV: Real Scientists - Learn more about cool careers, hot investigations, and science.
• ZOOM: Whose Chair? - Match job descriptions to job titles in this online matching game.

Read

• Career Day
  By Anne Rockwell
  Published April 2000 by Harper Collins
  Children get to see different careers in action when their class invites special visitors to talk about their work. The kids in Mrs. Madoff's class feel good about what they learn.
• The Sign Painter
  By Allen Say
  Published October 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company
  One morning, a young boy knocks on a sign painter's shop window and asks for a job. The boy proves that he knows how to paint, and the man hires him. When they are commissioned to paint a series of billboards in the desert, the boy dreams of art, but the job calls for a woman and one word: Arrowstar. The story takes a mysterious turn when they reach the site of the last billboard. Allen Say has written a haunting picture book for children 4-8 and older.

*As most PBS children's programs offer one year extended taping rights for teachers, please feel free to tape them now and save them for use in your classroom during the school year.