“What do you like?”

A 15-minute classroom activity for grades 3 to 5, built on one free web page. No account, no login, nothing saved.

Works on a phone, a tablet, a Chromebook or a laptop. One device per pair is plenty, and one device on the board also works.

Open the page your students will use Print the activity and the student sheet

Two pages. Page one is the plan, page two is the student half-sheet printed twice with a cut line.

What students get out of it

An interest they already have — animals, sports, food, building things — connects to real occupations they have never heard of, with the U.S. government’s own words for what those people do and its own count of how many of them there are.

The fifteen minutes

2 min
You set it upShow the eight pictures on the board. Say the rule out loud: there are no right answers, and nothing you tap is saved.
3 min
Pick twoEach student taps two things they like. Two is the number that matters — one interest gives an obvious list, two gives a list they did not expect.
5 min
Open three jobsFind one job you already knew about and one you had never heard of. Tapping a job shows what those people actually do at work.
3 min
Write it downThe half-sheet on page two of the printout. Name the job nobody knew, and one thing that person does.
2 min
ShareThree or four students read theirs out. The three questions below are an easy place to start if you want to keep going.

Three questions to ask

  1. Which job did you not know was a job?
  2. What does that person actually do? Read us one line.
  3. Which job has the most people doing it? Which has the fewest?

What usually surprises them

15,070
people in the country are professional athletes. 248,950 are coaches and scouts — more than sixteen coaches for every player.
2,120
astronomers. The smallest job on the page.
2,062,040
heavy truck drivers. The largest.
19,970
special effects artists and animators. Most children do not know that is a job at all.

Where every word on that page comes from

What each job does is the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET 30.3 task statements, and the four shown on each card are the four O*NET rates most important for that occupation — not the four we found easiest to read.

How many people do it, and what it pays, is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. The published figure, not an estimate of ours.

The lines children read are rewritten into plain language, and the government’s exact sentence is printed underneath every one of them, labelled, so any adult can check the rewrite on the spot.

There is no advice on the page. No ranking, no quiz, no score, no “careers for you”. It does not tell a child what to be, and it does not tell them what they are good at.

If you only have one screen

Run it from the board. Take a class vote on the first interest, then a second vote on a second interest, and open jobs together. The activity still works — the writing step and the three questions are unchanged.

For older students

The middle school page is the same jobs with the government’s sentences word for word, no rewriting, and sixteen interest groups instead of eight.

Start the activity at kelvocareers.com/elementary. Nothing about the student is saved. This page has no account, no score and no result: it stores nothing on the device and sends nothing anywhere.