Did I mention?

That my kids this year are brilliant? Oh, and this class of fifth graders also happens to be the Say Yes class, which means, among other things, they have college paid for to any university they choose to attend when they graduate from high school.

Rules we live by:

Work Hard. Love Learning. Respect our Community.


To set the tone for the class:

Day one:
Read Up the Learning Tree, a story about a slave boy who wasn't allowed to read and climbed a tree every day to learn to spy on a teacher's lessons and carved letters into the tree.

Day two:
Introduced these images of a bus school program in the slums of India.

Homework:
Draw connections between Henry in Up the Learning Tree and the students in India.


Start of Day Three:

Beautifully brilliant discussion about Henry and the students in India. Students started the discussion by talking about how grateful both Henry and the students in India were to just have the opportunity to learn and how they took advantage of any resources they had, even if they didn't have much to work with. They talked about how much they wanted to learn. They also talked about how the school in India had varying ages and that it must be hard to teach all those different ages on their correct levels. Then, we started talking about what this makes us think about the opportunities we have. The students talked about how lucky they were to have what they have and especially with Say Yes. Then, one girl said: We could start a program like Say Yes for the students in India! This sparked what one of my students called "an explosion of our minds!" Where literally every single student had their hands raised with ideas about what we could do to make the education experience for students in India and students around the world better. Their ideas included:

-Creating a Say Yes Program in India
-Building them a school
-Sending them our extra books and resources
-Building a classroom inside an RV for the students
-Creating a charity
-Going to India as a class and teaching the students what we know
-Bringing the students to our class for a year
-Creating a program for retired teachers to go teach in India
-Creating a program for teachers in the summer to go teach in India.

My mind was literally blown. They were such brilliant thinkers and social entrepreneurs I couldn't get over it! The beautiful thing is they were having a discussion in which they built off of each other's ideas and used accountable talk prompts like, "I agree with ____," or, "to add onto what ____" said....they were communicating better than 95% of adults communicate with one another. I kept telling them how floored I was with their ideas! I asked them how many of them were just in love with the conversation and all of their hands shot up, some shot both hands up. Some of them were having a hard time with the idea of "loving learning" on day 1. I told them that THIS is what loving learning feels like, and it was like a light bulb clicked in their heads. I asked if they were just in love with learning at that moment and again all hands shot up.

I could not ask for a better way to end week 1. What a beautiful thing to witness.