Settling in on the Second Day

The classroom atmosphere was noticeably calmer today, perhaps reflecting less anxiety and excitement among the students. Of course, the absence of one of yesterday's "centers of activity" might have played a role as well. As I commented to my master teacher, however, school - and the world at large - would be a pretty boring place if everyone conformed to expectations.

Today was largely devoted to continued community building, along with some introductory curricular activities. I made note of several for future use.

At the beginning of the day, while some students finished work from yesterday, others played "multiplication war" with a deck of cards. Easy to set up and learn, the game is played much like traditional war except that each student draws a pair of cards and calculates their product (ace=1, jack=11, queen=12 and king=0, plus the number cards). The player whose product is higher takes all four cards in the round.

At the end of the day, the kids listened to "Twelve Circus Rings," a rather simple (but amusingly illustrated) tale of the increasingly busy rings of a circus, told somewhat in the style of the "partridge in a pear tree" song. At the conclusion of the book, the students were instructed to work in groups to calculate the total number of performers (364). I elected to primarily work with two girls who normally spend most of their day in a self-contained special ed (learning disabilities?) classroom. After I demonstrated how they might use a series of drawings to solve the problem, they were able to jointly identify the patterns, write the equations and achieve success. It was a real high point of the day for all of us.

One other activity of particular note involved making written observations about a provocative photograph, and then responding to a short writing prompt. The photo was taken in 2007 in Guinea (western Africa). It depicts young people sitting on concrete posts, apparently studying. The article explains that students (as young as age 7) flock to the airport each night to study in the parking lot because it is one of the few places where electricity dependably illuminates the environment at night. Some of these students walk up to an hour in each direction, but they are the "lucky" ones because others live too far from the airport and have to study in gas station lots or by the light streaming out the windows of the homes of the wealthy. The link to this article is: http://www.denverpost.com/ci_6415996?IADID. Yes, I think the kids "got" it.