I knew right away that when I decided to do my lesson plan in a Juvenile Hall, that I wasn’t going to teach the inmates issues about homelessness, but that I was going to increase their awareness about the issue of homelessness. This was because I knew that majority of this audience was either going to be homeless when they get out of jail or that they were already homeless before they got into jail. This was the exact reason why I knew this was going to be a teaching event where I would get the opportunity from learning from my audience as well.

I went into the hall with a presentation made on PowerPoint. I broke up each slide into different themes of homelessness. However, I first began this presentation by having everyone go around introducing themselves and then saying one word that makes them think of homelessness. Then we continued on to defining what homelessness is.

Then we moved on to discuss what the causes of homelessness are. I explained to them the differences between the two intersecting factors of homelessness which includes personal susceptibility and structural conditions. Next, we continued on to learning about how many homeless people there are in the United States. Our next slide was a discussion on how homeless individuals are counted and where these numbers come from. The final slide was a discussion on how we solve homelessness.The main programs that we discussed involved a twelve step recovery program for drug addicts and alcoholics, a dress for success program, a daily stress and anger management program, and finally a nutrition program. By concluding my presentation, I decided to show a YouTube video clip that was about a man who was pretending to be homeless. The video taper caught this man on camera, watching him ask people for money. The video taper followed this man home and knocked on his door and confronted him about the nice house he lives in, and the Mercedes he was driving home, and asked if he is lying about being homeless. This caused a great discussion between the incarcerated kids between whether or not they thought this was right or wrong. It ended up being a very good discussion

I was very pleased with how much participation I got from all of the kids throughout the entire presentation. I personally feel they really enjoyed it and I helped increase their knowledge on homelessness and I couldn’t be any happier with where and how I chose to do my teaching project. I felt that everything went smoothly during this presentation as I planned it to and this is something I would definitely do again