The More We Work Together...

Today's lesson in English was interesting.

We are just about to come to the part of A Circle of Silver when the main characters get kidnapped by members of the Odawa tribe. So I thought it would be interesting if I kidnapped the class...and then I wondered how I would actually pull that off, so instead I modified my original plan slightly and kidnapped their chairs.

After lunch, my students came back and all their chairs were missing. We started the lesson, having the students sit on the floor and "make the best of this situation", asking before we began "does anyone know what happened?" and "who did this?" - after a few student presentations, my AT interrupted the class with a note she "found in her mailbox", which was a ransom note, saying that the class had to work together as a team to get their chairs back.

I was actually shocked at the outcome of the class. I planned two co-operative learning games that I had used at camp years ago to get the group to work as a team. The first was creating a human knot and then having the group untangle themselves...it was a successful disaster in short. I think they learned a lot, but it took a lot of yelling, arguing and angry students to get there. The next game we played was human scrabble. Each student got to write one letter on their hand and then they had to answer questions themed from the novel using only the letters they chose. The second game was a little more successful than the first, in that they were actually working as a group, but it was fascinating how much tension these games brought up. It is hard for 12 year olds to work as a group. After I gave them their chairs back, we sat in the "community egg" (because it never really looks like a circle) and debriefed what we learned today.

My eyes are wide open to how important cooperation is and how vital team building is in the classroom. The more we get together, the happier we'll be!