COMMUNITY SPIRIT: Rêveur hosts career day for students, community at Heritage

Skyler Hammons |, Tahlequah Daily Press, Okla.
·3 min read

Sep. 25—One of the branches of Heritage Elementary's house system provided students a chance to explore future occupations Monday through a career day.

Michelle Hilton, a fourth-grade math and science teacher at Heritage Elementary, said Rêveur, the house of dreamers, hosted the occasion. Rêveur is a part of a four-team house system program at Heritage based off of the one created by the Ron Clark Academy in Georgia.

"It gives our students an opportunity to come together and to feel more unified and to create a sense and an understanding of belonging as a whole versus a more individual approach in [different grade levels]," Hilton said.

The career day was not only for the students of Heritage Elementary but the community, as well. Hilton said Heritage Elementary Principal Amanda Vance had the four houses — Amistad, Rêveur, Altruismo and Isibindi — come up with an annual activity for each branch to reach out to the community.

"We were having so much fun encouraging the students with all of our houses and the culture it was bringing into the school that we wanted to come up with a way for the community and the parents to be able to feel the excitement and energy and to see what the house system was creating within the culture of the school," Hilton said.

When Rêveur representatives met to discuss what they wanted to do for their outreach project this year, they decided to host a career day on World Dream Day — Monday, Sept. 25. This is the second time for Rêveur to host the career day, with this being the first year for it to take place on World Dream Day.

Hilton said the career day event featured parents and members of Tahlequah talking with students about their dreams and how they turned it into a reality.

"We wanted the parents and the community to speak into the lives of the students and be able to share their experiences because it's one thing to tell the students how important it is to dream big and realize their dreams and it's one thing to even share with them from characters in a book or pictures in a book about being a fireman, policeman or nurse. It's one thing to share that in a story form and it's another to have them experience that with a person," Hilton said.

While the event introduced different career choices to the students, it also helped to give parents and guardians a chance to be involved with the school. Besides having speakers talk to the students about various occupations, students also dressed up as their future occupation.

The event looked different for each grade level with the older students completing a career interest inventory. The activity helped students to determine some jobs and certain fields that may fit their personality and interests by answering various questions.

"We wanted to make sure we were giving our students the tools that they needed to realize their dreams," Hilton said. "That it was not just enough to have the dream, but we wanted our students to realize their dream can become a reality, and we wanted to plant seeds into their lives of how [community members did] that and how it started."