Democracy in the Classroom

Because we believe in empowering kids, we give the students decision making power.  Every day during morning meeting, students have the opportunity to make a suggestion.  Once a suggestion has been made, the students have to come up with three reasons to accept the proposal.  They also have to come up with reasons to reject the proposal.  Once we've thought about these reasons on both sides, we have a vote.

This summer, students have voted to have some craft activities (melting beads, slime) and to change the way we line up when going to another activity (recess, lunch, gym, computer lab).  We've also seen kids settle disputes among themselves by voting.  "Let's vote!" is shouted whenever there is a decision to be made.  To be honest, "Let's do rock, paper, scissors!" is also shouted.  Sometimes we have to vote about whether to decide by vote or by the rock, paper, scissors game!  In any case, the students are enjoying the power of the vote.  Let's hope they hold on to that as they get older!

Students voting during morning meeting

Adding craft activities, deciding to join other classes on a field trip to the farmer's market, and having a daily line leader are all fairly easy decisions that the students have made.  However, during week three, we hit a major problem as students let their voices be heard about one of the bed rocks of the LEAP program -- Book Club.  During morning meeting, a student suggested we stop having Book Club -- the reason?  It's boring, we were told.  This happened as we had moved into longer chapter books and the kids were wishing they didn't have to read the same book day after day.  (Earlier books had been completed in one or two days.)  What to do?  We had told the students we valued what they had to say -- and they had a major critique.

In the end, we gave them a limit.  We needed to do something that encouraged their reading and writing.  We are here to improve literacy skills.  So that was a hard limit -- any suggestions they had about what we could do during Book Club would be taken seriously, as long as they promoted reading and/or writing.

Each child sat down and wrote me a letter suggesting improvements to Book Club and giving reasons that their suggestion would be good and would promote literacy.  Some kids asked that we leave Book Club as it is -- no changes!  It's fun as it is.  Other kids had suggestions about writing their own book or reading a book and then turning it into a play.  Fortunately, we have three teachers in the classroom, so we were able to make everyone happy.  Ms. Claire continued reading Junie B. Jones and that Meanie Jim's Birthday with the children who liked Book Club as it is.  Ms. Emily began to work with students who wanted to write their own graphic novel.  Last, a group of students worked with me to turn Stone Soup into a play.  They've taken the story and added their own ingredients -- including pizza, chocolate, and sweet coconut.

The cover of the graphic novel written by students

In the end, the students are more engaged because they are using their literacy skills the way they want to.  And they are still learning important literacy skills.  The two groups who created their own stories learned about the importance of a narrative arc and are writing their own unique ideas.

Perhaps even more important that the literacy skills that the children worked on, the value of hearing everyone's voices, negotiating for good solutions, giving reasons for their positions, and voting has become central to how the kids work through situations.  Here is one example: our trip to the Farmer's Market was delayed by rain.  When we went on the rescheduled day, some of the children had forgotten to bring money.  I had a small group -- four young men -- and gave each of them one dollar (which was all I had with me).  They bought some water (it was a hard day) and were down to two dollars when we reached the bakery booth.  Delicious, homemade cookies beckoned -- but they were four dollars for a package.  The kids huddled in front of the booth, discussed how they could pool their money and which treats they should buy.  One child didn't like chocolate, so they negotiated over whether to buy chocolate chip cookies (which only had small amounts of chocolate) or snickerdoodles.  They settled on the snickerdoodles, but were still in trouble, since they didn't have enough money for a full package of cookies.  The woman who ran the booth had overheard their discussion and was impressed by how they were working as a team, pooling their money, and trying to be fair to all -- so she sold them the four dollar package for two dollars!  I was so proud of how they had used democratic values to solve their problems -- and pleased that they got recognition for their efforts from someone outside the program.

Writing (and Reading) with purpose!

It’s our second week for the LEAP Program at Seymour Dual Language Academy and the kids are getting into the rhythm of our day. We integrate reading and writing for real purposes throughout the day so that kids will see that literacy matters.  

Students gather around Ms. Claire during breakfast.

Breakfast and Letter Writing

We begin the day with breakfast – a casual time during which friends reconnect. This is a time when children also write letters to one another and to their teachers, their parents, and others. (We had one child write a letter to the zoo after our field trip last week.)

A student mails a letter in our class mail box.  Later in the day, a democratically elected letter carrier (one of the kids!) will deliver the letters to their recipients.  Each letter is in an envelope, with a "stamp" in the upper right corner.  (We use stickers for stamps.)

Book Club

During book club, students read high quality trade paperbacks and discuss the stories and the writing done by the authors. When discussing Apt. 3, by Ezra Jack Keats, a student told me that he likes it when an author leaves it to the reader to figure out what is happening in a story or how a character is feeling, rather than just saying something. For example, when Sam lingers by Betsy’s door, this student figured out that Sam might have a crush on her – and he loved that Mr. Keats got that message across by describing Sam’s actions, rather than just saying, “Sam had a crush on Betsy.” Thinking this way about books will help our students be better writers themselves.

Students read Jaden Toussaint, the Greatest: The Search for Screen Time in a book club.  Students are given the choice of three different books and pick the story that interests them the most.

Problem-Solving

As I mentioned in the previous post, the students are also working on solving some pretty big problems: the problem of bullying and the problem of gun violence. Again, the students write with a real purpose and use the letter format to convey their ideas. Students in the gun violence group are writing drafts of letters to our Senators and Representative. One child details in his letter the impact of gun violence in his own life. Let’s hope our government officials will listen to this passionate young people!

A student poses with the beginning of his letter to Sen. Schumer, asking that AR-15s be banned.  Pride in their work makes us so happy!

And we're off! Week One of the Summer Program

It's a delight to be back at Seymour Dual Language Academy with a curious group of kids working on reading, writing, and changing the world.  Each morning we have Book Club where children choose what book they would like to read in small groups and discuss.  We've already read a pile of books -- including Ling and Ting: Not Exactly the Same by Grace Lin, Apt. 3 by Ezra Jack Keats, Three Stories You Can Read to Your Dog by Sarah Swan Miller, Abuela's Birthday by Jacqueline Jules, The Boy Who Didn't Believe in Spring by Lucille Clifton, and Dancing in the Wings by Debbie Allen.  But by far the most popular book was This is Black Panther from Marvel.  The kids jumped into their Book Club discussion, comparing the book to the movie and imagining themselves as super heroes.    And they are super heroes.  The children have picked two important problems in their community to tackle this summer: gun violence and bullying.  They spend the second half of the morning researching the causes of those problems and what solutions have already been tried.  As the summer continues, they will develop their own solutions to those problems and work to get their solutions enacted.  Stay tuned for details as their work progresses! In addition to their work in Book Club and Problem Solving, the children are working to create a democracy in the classroom.  During Morning Meeting, they take turns being chair person, and facilitate discussions about future plans for the program.  So far, they have voted to use some time last Friday to make clay projects (they had a blast! – Pictures to come in the next blog post.)  They also voted that they will line themselves up alphabetically when they go out to recess or to lunch, each day moving the leader from the previous day to the end of the line.  They work for fairness in their decisions. There is so much going on in the classroom that I didn’t have time to take a lot of pictures.  I did get pictures when we went to the Rosamond Gifford Zoo on Wednesday.  These are amazing kids, learning and growing in a hundred ways!  Here they are learning about the reticulated python.

Keeping it Real!

Working out is important
-- but it isn't the end goal!

Children do a lot of writing in school -- they fill out worksheets, answer reading comprehension questions, practice their spelling words.  Writing like this is similar to working out in a gym -- running in place on a treadmill, lifting heavy objects just to put them down again, etc.  These are not activities you would do in real life -- but they prepare you for the real activities.  When I go to the gym, my real goal is not to be able to walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes.  My goal is to be able to walk the four flights of stairs to my office without huffing and puffing.  In the same way, when children write out their spelling words, the real goal isn't to learn to spell hundreds and hundreds of words on a list.  The goal is to be able to write letters to friends or to write out plans for a new business or to express feelings in a poem.  Reading and writing are ultimately about communication -- I am talking to you, now, with words I wrote yesterday or the day before.  I can reach out across time and space and connect with you because we both know how to read and write.


Just like the athlete who works out in the gym, however, we do need to practice.  Children need to learn grammar and spelling.  These are important tools that they work on throughout the school year. The trick is to not lose sight of the real goal while you're practicing.  When Literacy Empowers All People works with children over the summer, that is what we do.  With the freedom that summer provides us (no testing! no homework!), we are able to focus on writing for real.  We avoid having children write something that is not part of communication between one person and another.  When they work on reading comprehension, their goal is to explain what they read to other children in the class who read a different book.  When they write essays, it is to share with us the problems they would like to solve in their communities.  And, at the end of the program, they present, in writing, carefully researched solutions to those problems to people who can implement them.  Our students have written to mayors and state legislators -- even to the President of the United States.  They have presented their ideas to their principal -- and have seen them enacted. 

Here at LEAP we believe that focusing on the real purposes of reading and writing will help out students improve much faster than drilling them on spelling or grammar would.  This summer, we will be measuring how much the children improve as well as taking the authenticity (or "realness") of the reading and writing they do each day.  Our expectation is that children who participate in more authentic literacy tasks will improve even more than those who have less authentic literacy instruction.  This is exciting research that will guide how we work with our amazing kids in the future.  Doing this research, however, costs money -- we have a lot of books and pens and pencils to buy.  We need to have teachers who have time to work closely with each student (we have a 1:5 student/teacher ratio).  I hope you'll help us reach our goals by supporting LEAP.  You can make your tax deductible contribution here.