Action Day!
On Fridays, perhaps every Friday or perhaps alternate Fridays, we will take action with our reading and writing. We are still imagining what this will look like, but we imagine it will be working on the website, developing fundraisers, and writing books to send to our sister school in Guatemala.
The students in our class are so smart and so compassionate that they want to do something with all that we are learning. We read for knowledge, and we write to learn.. All language is rhetoric -- using the symbol of language to inform, persuade, and/or entertain, so let's do something with our writing that participates and critically engages in the world.
Today, we typed our business letters about Chicza, a bio-degradable gum made by chicleros in Central America. Because we cannot buy this gum in America, students wrote to Whole Foods to persuade them to take steps to bring this gum to their stores. (We did research on the gum industry and the chiclero co-operatives earlier in the year.) Why? Students like to chew gum, but they realize (because of their inquiry) that all the gum they consume is synthetic and not biodegradable, so it is accumulating in our environment; they also realize why schools "ban" gum -- it costs a lot to remove gum from carpet, and carpeting costs a lot of money.
During our study of the Maya and the Guatemalan Civil War and genocide, students learned the importance of literacy in other countries when it comes to human rights and fighting for human rights. They want to raise the literacy rate in Guatemala, so today we learned about a school in Guatemala that is doing really good work with children in their community. They would like to build a relationship with us, and I think can be a positive example of globalization; we can learn about the lives of other children in the world, and they can learn about ours. Thus, we started an Action Plan to brainstorm ideas.
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