Past Two Weeks

So there has been a lot happening in the past two weeks. Last week was our first week meeting again after the students had their spring break. We were unable to use the extra classroom so we went in the hallway to work. It went well for the most part, but was more difficult towards the end. Arielle and I had planned on working on a letter to the Principle asking about getting a compost bin on the school grounds, and also making a letter to send home to families encouraging participation in the upcoming Earth Day Clean-up in the Folwell-Camden neighborhoods on April 16th from 9-12:30. But once again, we changed our entire plan only minutes before we met with the students! We decided to present a different option-an earth day clean-up at the school. Most of them liked the idea. The only fear was that some students in the school would not want to participate and then would make fun of the students in our group for it. This is a very legitimate fear, but we thought that we could also make it more appealing to their classmates by including prizes or something. So we went down to ask the principle if there were any clean-up or earth day events planned for earth day. She said that there wasn't, that it was her birthday, and that there was actually no school on Earth Day. But she said she would fully support us puttin something together sometime that week! So we went back up to the hallway to start planning this day. This is when we lost them I think. There were many distractions. We started writing our "Mission Statement" which would be a great outline to use for bringing our fully sculpted idea to the principle. This last week we were able to use the extra classroom which was very helpful. Arielle was unable to make it due to uncontrollable circumstances, but another classmate, Paloma, came to observe so it kind of evened out. We first went down to the Principle's office to schedule a meeting for next Wednesday to show her our ideas for the earth day clean-up (that won't actually be on Earth Day). After scheduling that meeting we went upstairs to the classroom and got to work on the mission statement. We finished up the part that talked about how trash affects the community, and started in on our proposal of what to do to solve the problem of trash! They worked really hard. Arielle and I prepared questions for them to answer to create their proposal such as-Who should be involved? (consider who you want to impact?) Where should we pick up trash? How long should we clean-up for? etc. It was great to hear all the wonderful ideas they had, and try to come up with the best one. I had a student writing the proposal ideas so it took a little longer to get it all down. I feel like a lot got done, and they worked really hard, but I still don't feel like we are quite prepared to go to the Principal's office next week. I had to applaud my group though, they were on-task pretty much the whole time. I think it helped that we were in the classroom, but also because I split two of the boys up; they just can't sit together and stay focused. There might be one more part of the proposal we have to finish, and then I wanted to go over a couple questions we need to ask the Principal when we get there. An important part that was missed was going over how to have a meeting. Another group did a wonderful job of role play. They were pretending that they were going to go into the Principal's office and practiced what they would say! Our group didn't really have time to even talk about it, so I plan on going in on Tuesday and working with them during their lunch. One of the students did volunteer to talk about the proposal to the Principle, but I still think there's some preparation to do before Wednesday! Though I didn't think we got everything done that I wanted to get done I think that this week was very encouraging. I'm excited to see how this all comes together! My students are doing WONDERFULLY!