Help me give my students supplies and materials for multicultural poetry, belongingness, and service learning lessons plus some lights and mics to be better seen and heard in virtual class!
Our school is celebrating it's first year as an International Baccalaureate World School - launching our program and its classes completely remotely!
Our inaugural cohort of IB Diploma candidates is an amazing group of young scholars from all racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, income levels, first languages, and walks of life.
The thing that ties them together is determination, motivation, and grit!
These young scholars have committed to taking six honors courses in six subject areas over the next two years: IB English, Spanish, History, Psychology, Biology, Math, and Art. Eleven of them are also taking college-to-career academy courses; two are ELD students; one is doubling in language acquisition. They are athletes, musicians, club members, and exceptional young adults, all eager to follow the IB mission to "help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect."
My Project
We are currently 100% remote and it is beginning to seem unlikely that we will return to our classrooms at any time during the current school year. It is tough to forge relationships and build communities virtually, but we have been doing our best to make it happen and are ready to get a bit more vulnerable as a class.
As part of a lesson on "Knowledge and the Knower," students have been asked to write an "I am From" poem that will include memories of ancestors, foods, sights, sounds, smells, and sayings from students' homes, plus ethnic heritage, religious beliefs, and family tales that have been passed down generationally.
Students will post their poems virtually and we will do a gallery walk to learn about each other and discover commonalities we may not have imagined we shared. I plan to surprise the students by printing a photo of each of them, printing their poem on vellum paper that will overlay the photo, and framing it. The artwork will be gifted to each of the students to have during distance learning, but will eventually be returned to school and displayed in a common area for all to enjoy and learn from when we are - one day - face to face again.
Once we've crossed our figurative bridges by sharing our background stories and poems, we plan to cross bridges literally. On three occasions, we will meet and stay safe (masks, and hand sanitizers) and socially distance while we walk together the span of three different Bay Area, CA bridges totaling about 16 miles. We also plan to bring garbage bags and gloves to clean up our community as we swap stories and smiles!
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