Successful First Day!! :)

So my classmates and I had our first visit to the 5th grade classroom we will be working with at Sojourner Truth Academy yesterday (Wednesday)!!! There's about 25 students in the class who will be splitting up into 5 different core issue groups.

We started our time there with an ice-breaker. They had to think about a one-word character trait or stength that they had that would benefit their public achievement group. Some wrote leader, drawer, math thinker, reader, speaker, encourager, organizer, and more! We (my classmates and I) also participated in this activity. Then it was time to introduce ourselves-students included! Everyone got up and walked around the room introducing themselves to each other. "Hi my name is _____, and I'm a(n)______!" And they talked about how their strength is important for their group. It was fun learning their names and hearing more about them!

Our second activity got them thinking more in depth about issues they already wrote about. They had a journaling activity to do in which they wrote about one thing they would change if they could. There were five different key issue areas we (the coaches) recognized, so we made 5 posters labeled "violence," "fighting," "increased knowledge" (aka. education)," "bullying," and "trash/environment." We added a poster labeled "anything else?" so that the students could add anything that we missed. They were split into 6 groups and spent about 3 minutes at each poster discussing why the issue on the poster was an important issue and should be addressed. They wrote their ideas on post-it notes and stuck them to the poster. I was at the "trash/environment" poster for this activity. I was surprised at how interested in this activity the majority of them were. They were very thoughtful in their responses. Many themes arose in their concerns about trash/environment. They were concerned about the health impacts on humans, pollution of drinking water, harm to animals, and the overall appearance of the community due to littering. I am excited to see what the "trash/environment" issue group comes up with to address one of these issues!!

After this activity ended the students sat back down at their seats and were able to write down their top three issues they would be interested in working on. Over half of the students chose violence as their first choice which shows that it must be a very big issue. Interestingly the topic of "increased knowledge" was the next largest in amount of interest with the students.

After class we had a debrief with Michael K. and Kristy. It was good to quickly talk about how everyone felt about the things that worked, and the things that we would have changed or done differently. We got a chance to split the students into groups and choose the group we will be working with. Arielle and I are working with 5 students whose first or second choice was to work to create change concerning the issue of "trash/environment." From the small amount of interactions I had with the students that are now in the trash/environment group I think we have a great group of students and I am excited to work with them.

There were a few things that we could have done differently or better. One would have been to have already pre-deligated roles for each activity. We, the coaches, did a fairly good job of working together, but I think it was somewhat unorganized for our liking because we weren't sure who was introducing what activity. In the end, it would have been better to have clarity on each one of our roles. Another thing that we decided would have been better would have been to leave out the summary of each poster at the end before they voted. After the students went around and discussed the importance of each poster we summarized what everyone had said, and during debrief we felt this wasn't necessary and took away from some time the students could have kept talking about the issues.

One thing that worked nicely was the ice-breaker. Many of us had our doubts on how the students would like it, but there was much interaction with the activity and many students seemed to have fun with it. I also felt like the coaches did a very good job of working together and planning for this first day with the students.

I enjoyed this first day very much!! I'm excited to get to know the students even better and dive into the issues they have with trash/environment! For the longest time I had wanted to be an upper elementary teacher, so it's exciting to be able to work with this age of students again!