When we arrived this week to Red Hill, the students had already separated out into their groups for Social Studies. The children were focusing on three ancient civilizations—Mali, Rome, and Greece. It seemed like each teacher was responsible for one of the three, which seemed like a great idea, so they could go further in depth on their specific subject. Since the children had been working on this unit for some time now, the introduction to the lesson was more of a refresher, referring to what they had been working on last time, and transitioning into a new project. The students would be creating a museum book, a very novel idea that I was intrigued by. Mrs. Garcia demonstrated a finished product, a four page book that converted into a pop-up, self-standing display. The “pages”, which became walls, were covered with exhibits and mosaics. After describing what the students would include on the walls of their museum, she distributed packets from which they would create the book. It came with detailed instructions, as well as lines and folds for how the more intricate parts of the design would come together. The students began working on this project as Deborah and I monitored their progress and assisted in helping the students determine what they wanted to include.

Once the students worked on this for about 15 minutes, then Mrs. Garcia had them gather at the meeting place, where she introduced the next part of the lesson. The students would now work in their interactive journals, pulling information from these to create summaries on the student computers. The interactive journals are used specifically for social studies; the students paste worksheets, articles, diagrams, and pictures into a notebook, so that they can have an organized compilation of the studies they have done in the class. It was an interesting concept, in that the students could be held accountable for having prior work, as everyone pasted their notes into notebook. Also, since a lot of the information was typed, it was neater and easier to read, and students could share their notebooks with others easily, if need be. In addition to working from their notes, the students could access a website on ancient Rome, looking up historic figures, maps, and information about all things Roman. Between this resource and their notes, they were given plenty of material to synthesize. Mrs. Garcia, remembering how I had mentioned last class that I enjoyed typing, suggested for Deborah and I to assist the children with their keyboarding. With this we could practice some guided learning, asking what kind of information they wanted to include, and helping them find it in the sources provided. We worked on this with kids, moving around to make sure everyone was making progress, until the end of the class period.

The children’s behavior had been impeccable—until the final minutes of the day. Mrs. Garcia had to run to the office to pick up Chik-fil-a family night vouchers for the students to give to their parents. She initiated a game of “BUZZ” for them to play while she was gone. The way “BUZZ” works is students are given a prompt—this one was multiples of 3—and they go around the room, taking turns going through numbers 1 to whatever. Whenever a person gets to the specified prompt (in this example, 3, 6, 9, 12, etc.), instead of saying the number, they say the word BUZZ. This seemed like a great idea to me, having the children work together, while reinforcing multiplication tables. However, the game quickly got out of hand, with children not paying attention, and others butting in, and scolding classmates for getting one wrong, when really they got it right—I tried to intervene, reminding them that no one should be talking unless it was their turn. Mrs. Garcia returned in time to “save” me, rounding up the kids and distributing the vouchers on their way out. We saw them to the bus, and talked up Mrs. Garcia, getting feedback about her students’ typical behavior, which, as we agreed, was generally very good. It’s easy for anyone to see why they would be a bit rowdy at the end of the day.