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World of Children: Worland High School students gain life experience

WORLAND – A partnership between Worland High School and Worland Preschool School allows high school students to become teachers three times a week.

The family and consumer sciences class, taught by Brenda Trippel, is a two-semester elective course that starts with high school students learning child development and guidance from pregnancy to age 6. The course's second semester is when the high school students become teachers and teach Worland Preschool students from the World of Children program.

Heather Wagner, owner of Worland Preschool, said during the end of the high schoolers first semester in family and consumer sciences, after they've learned enough of child development, the high schoolers will come to the preschool to observe the preschoolers behavior before they teach them.

Learning the development and guidance from the first semester is beneficial and allows high schoolers to apply those principles to the second semester course, where they will teach preschoolers in the World of Children program, Trippel said.

World of Children is a 36-year-old program where preschoolers travel to the high school three times a week to learn their alphabet unit. Wagner said she believes the program teaches preschoolers much more than that.

"It teaches them to take direction from other adults who are not their teachers ... and lets them see that there's more to the outside learning environment than school," Wagner said. "They also learn safety when they walk over to the high school."

Mainly, the high school students use crafts to introduce the preschoolers to the week's letter. This week, the letter "U" was one of the letters preschoolers learned, and the high schoolers had students like Brayden Jordan and Halle Tommerup finger paint polka-dotted letter U's and make U-shaped umbrellas with tissue paper and pipe cleaners.

If the preschoolers finish their alphabet assignments early, it is not unusual to see them stay active and play with puzzles or play catch with their assigned teachers.

Trippel said World of Children is a great program that has a long standing role in the community, and it becomes very memorable for students, and she's known of some students who've have had such a positive experience being involved with World of Children as a preschooler that they've enrolled in the course to teach themselves.

This semester's program began in mid-January, and will end Wednesday, Trippel said, and because of the time-frame high school students really get the chance to get to know the preschoolers and identify the best ideas and themes to get them to learn their alphabet.

Trippel said the program has even helped students figure out their career options and she had a student participate in the program for six years and now she is going to graduate with a degree in education.