My first day at Bancroft was a blast. The night before at my house while I was getting ready to meet the fifth graders I kept running through possible scenarios that may occur while leading my small group. I think that is a pretty good implication that I was excited to get our public achievement projects started.
I gathered some materials: a printed map of the Bancroft neighborhood, "getting to know you"questions on individual pieces of paper, stories of successful PA groups from previous years etc... I wanted to be prepared for my first day working with the class, I was more excited than nervous the only thing I felt nerves about was being a disappointment. I was worried about generating conversation and excitement for our PA projects.
When we arrived at Bancroft I realized that I could just be excited again because the kids were visibly excited about this project. There was plenty of energy in the room,you could see they were expecting us and had ideas ready to share. It was nice that they were ready to share but I was also wondering how many of their ideas had been planted in their heads and how many were truly a problem they had concern for.
In my group we decided to play two truths and a lie over random questions and funny stories. It went pretty smoothly and everyone understood and liked the game. Since I am bad with names and I had five new ones to instantly remember I figured I should turn two truths and a lie into a writing activity where each student would write there first and last names on their paper and I would read them off. While this was a game for them it was also practice remembering first and last names for me.
We put a list of essential agreements together, we all signed it. It was nice to have to refer back to if need be. What ended up working best for our group was having one mic which was passed between the group and whoever had it had the floor. That's not to say that people weren't talking over one another anyways, but in this scenario having too much conversation was better than too little. We were just getting to know each other in a small amount of time.
We generated a lot of good ideas, some I could tell they were passionate about and some I believe were planted in their heads. I had a note taker which helped catch ideas that I may have missed, and a lot of good contributors. It concerned me that the conversation in my group was not shared evenly by all the kids. I had four out-spoken kids and one shy one. I wanted to get her ideas too but also didn't want to put her on stage in front of her friends... I'll have to think about how to handle those situations in the future and I'm sure plenty of other tricky situations that I look forward to.
