Pickin' Projects

This week MCTC was on Spring Break, but Sojourner Truth Academy was NOT, so we still went in to meet with our public achievement groups!

It was a lot warmer on Wednesday than it has been in the past, so we decided to change up our meeting schedule slightly, and go outside to do a small observation. Arielle had observed that there was only one trash can in a one block radius around the school, and that trash can was across the street by the church; it was also very small. So we asked our group to observe not only on the playground (that's the only place outside we could go) but look beyond the fenced in area for trash, trash cans, and vandalism. One of the students asked if we could start picking up trash! I told him that we'd probably need gloves first, but that's something we could possibly do sometime.

We kind of discussed what was written in the journals and asked how we all were doing, and reviewed what we did the prior week when we were going outside, so Arielle and I decided it would be best to skip those planned activities. We basically jumped right into talking about the projects that were brainstormed last week. Then onto voting on which project (or 2) they would want to do. The most votes went to creating a compost bin, and boarding up Willard Park. Most of them seemed very excited about both of them except for one student, but I think it's only because his idea didn't get picked. He's still on board for the other projects though!

We then went into the Cube game we played a few weeks ago to come up with questions that we still needed answered to be able to start doing this project. The students rolled a die and the corresponding word they would need to use to start their question. Some questions were, "Can we get a compost bin?" (like, is it even possible) and, "How can we make a compost bin?" and, "What are we going to do with the dirt?" and, "Where can we put the compost bin?" They came up with some very good questions that we should consider when trying to do the project.

We continued the meeting by discussing (roughly) what the rest of the year was going to look like. Though it was kind of tough to talk about because we had just decided about what projects we wanted to do, so we'll do more detailed agenda creating next time we get together.

Arielle and I mentioned an Earth Day Clean-up with the Folwell and Weber Camden neighborhood on the 16th of April to our students. We wanted to see if they'd be interested in doing something like that to learn what one would look like, and then maybe implement their own. It seemed like a long conversation, but it eventually seemed like something everyone would be interested in doing.

We ended our meeting once again with our journal question for the following meeting. The journal entry was, "For each of our projects: Compost Bin and Boarding up Willard Park what do we need to know and what do we need to do next?"

Hopefully they'll come up with more questions that we need to find the answers to, or find the answers to questions we have asked!

This coming Wednesday is their spring break, so we will not be meeting. :( So much to do and so little time left!! I feel like we have enough time though...just enough time.