GAGE, which stands for Getting a Great Education, is a volunteer program at an elementary school in the metro Atlanta. Currently, GAGE meets with up to a hundred third graders, approximately once a week for half an hour, to teach supplemental lessons using non-traditional, active learning techniques which encourage students to take ownership of their education. The 3 Steps to Getting a Great Education are to:
About a year ago, through volunteering at Must Ministries, I met John and his wife Donna, a retired lawyer and journalist, respectively. In early December, I saw John at Must wearing a volunteer sticker for a local elementary school. When I asked him about the sticker, I found out that he created and teaches a program called GAGE (Getting a Great Education) on Thursday mornings to third-graders. He invited me to observe one of his lessons, and I was immediately hooked! Since then, I've co-taught some of the lessons with John and taught some of my own lessons when he was out of town.
My first time observing GAGE was so much fun and so informational! The topic this week was “Courageous Women,” and John made a slideshow lesson about Phyllis Latour Doyle, who was recently awarded the Legion of Honor, France's highest decoration for bravery, for her courageous service as one of a few British women operating as a spy during World War II. She was only 23 years old when she was parachuted behind enemy lines where she posed as a 14 year old French girl selling soap in Axis-occupied Normandy. Mrs. Doyle gathered intelligence, which she transmitted in a total of 135 coded messages, on German positions in preparation for preparation for the D-Day landings. Here are two pictures of Mrs. Doyle:
[Pictures]
At the end of the lesson, John saved some time for the kids to have a Q&A with me. It was as if he brought a friend for Show & Tell, and I was the object of curiosity. The student population is about half Caucasian and half Hispanic so the students were very interested to hear more about China, which is where I was born and where I lived for a short time. They asked questions like:
All in all, I had a great time, and GAGE is an excellent program. I'm sure I learned as much from John as the kids did. And the kids are so awesome! The 2 to 7 year old age range is my favorite because they say the most hilarious things and they see the world from such an interesting perspective. The third-grade teachers were also really great and enthusiastically asked me to keep coming back. There's no GAGE next week and then school's out the following two weeks for the Holiday Break, but I'm really looking forward to continuing GAGE in the new year!
When I showed up, John tossed me one of two green camping hats that he had with him and told me we were going to do a skit today to link current events to the 3 Steps of GAGE. Eight new “Goldilocks Planets” were recently discovered. Similar to their name-sake, Goldilocks Planets orbit their respective sun in a habitable zone not too close to and also not too far from the sun, so that the temperature is in a range in which water might exist. Two of the eight new Goldilocks Planets, Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, are similar in size to Earth and are made of rock, like Earth.
After sharing the news about the Goldilocks Planets, John and I performed a short three-minute skit. We transported to a Goldilocks Planet where the ability to skip well determined one's success on our Goldilocks Planet. I was a teacher in a class where John one of my students. For the lesson that day, I was teaching to the class how to skip. As I was doing the demonstration, John kept staring off into space, goofing off, and just not paying attention. Every time I turned my back, he was up was doing something else. The kids loved this and laughed every time. The roles fit and contrasted perfectly with John's goofy personality and my more reserved nature. When the skit was over, we talked about the importance of paying attention in class, which ties into the first step of Getting a Great Education, and then we reiterated the 3 Steps of GAGE.
The second half of the lesson was on the beginnings of books as we know them today. In their regular classes, the children were making their own books, so for GAGE, John told them the story of two libraries. The Library of Alexandria, one of the largest and grandest libraries of the Ancient World, kept its books in the form of papyrus scrolls, which were mainly produced and used by the Ancient Egyptians. The Ancient Greeks had a library at Pergamon that rose to rival the splendor of Alexandria's library. Legend says the Ancient Egyptians raised the price and limited the supply of papyrus to curb the Greek library's growth. This led the Greeks to find new ways to produce books in parchment, or animal skin, which were later bound into book-like objects.
The last two times I visited, I taught the students how to count to five in my first language: Cantonese Chinese. Before I met them, they had already learned how to count to five in Japanese from John. He used a mnemonic to help them remember, so he asked that I create an mnemonic to help the students learn to count in Chinese.
I can't remember what I originally came up with, but luckily, my friend Katie R., who studied English in both her undergraduate and graduate schools, very quickly came up with the words to the mnemonics which I turned into a short presentation.
At the end, one of the boys raised his hand and asked why I had a picture of One Direction in the last slide for the number five. (Answer: because there's five guys in One Direction.)
After learning to count to five, John gave a presentation on Georgia's flora and fauna, which was what the students were learning in class this week.
We put up Count to Five in Chinese slides at the beginning of the lesson again today, but it wasn't necessary. The students remembered and counted in a chorus with us before we started the slides. The mnemonic worked!!
The main lesson today was on Animal Adaptations, which is a continuation of the animal life lesson from the previous week. I mostly just manned the laptop while John gave the presentation, but something funny happened... so GAGE takes place in the lunchroom where the tables each have sixteen round seats, eight on each side, attached to the main frame. Two seats down from me, two little boys were playing with a paper clip during the presentation. When it became distracting to other students, I reach out my hand, palm up, for the boy closer to me to give me the paper clip. He quickly got rid of the paper clip and gave me two palms up with an angelic face that said: I have no idea what you're talking about. It was funny – and a bit frustrating – to see him feign innocence, but the distraction stopped so there was no need to say anything else.
Today's my first time flying solo since John is on vacation. The students are studying Franklin Delano Roosevelt in class this week so I made a slideshow presentation on fun facts about FDR. Here are some interesting facts that I didn't know about FDR before researching for this lesson:
After each presentation, there's usually a few minutes for the students to have a Q&A. There were a lot of questions on Fala like \"how old was FDR's dog when he died?\" and \"who took care of Fala after FDR died?\" It's funny to see what's important to kids and what questions they're interested in answering. Next time, I will do more research on the pet aspect and will probably exclude the slide on FDR's alphabet agencies, which was too in depth for the third-grade level. Overall, it was a great first solo lesson.
I'm skipping GAGE this week because the third-grade head teacher Mrs. M. let spend the day shadowing her to observe her class. With mandated student surveys and tornado drills, it was a busy day. I'll write more about my observations later if I have time, but the highlight of the day was definitely recess. It was too cold to go outside for recess so instead, the class danced in unison (sort of) to a cartoon zumba workout video. It was so adorable getting to see the kids dance and have fun.
Last week, while researching third-grade lessons, I came across a gumdrop building activity. Basically, you take gumdrops and toothpicks, and you build bridges and buildings out of them. When I told my sister about it, she told me she had recently done a similiar activity at her business school. They had a competition to build the tallest self-supporting bridge. Apparently, there's a study showing that given the same exercise to business school students, regular adults, college students, high school students, middle school students, and elementary school students, the winners were, of course, the business school students, but the second place winners were elementary school students! Whatever happened to our creativity? Picasso was on to something when he said he spent a lifetime trying to paint like a child again.
So... I started the lesson talking about idea of tension and compression. The kids liked that I had them pull on each other's hands to experience tension and push against each other's palms to feel compression. This gave them a tangible understanding of an otherwise abstract idea.
Then, I asked the kids which they thought was stronger: triangle or square? “Raise your hand if you think a triangle is stronger.” I saw movement from two or three kids, but when they saw that none of their forty plus classmates had raised their hands, the correct kids quickly lowered their hands. It happened so quickly that I could not tell who they were and so could not point them out. Then I asked, “who thinks a square is stronger?” Everybody raised their hands. (Oh, peer pressure...) I then took out a gumdrop triangle and a gumdrop square I had prepared the night before. I applied pressure to both to show the kids that the square warps, but the triangle does not. (Fun fact: the triangle is the only polygon that cannot change its shape/form without changing the length of its sides. Every other polygon you can change the shape and th degrees of the individual angles without changing the lengths of its sides.)
This was all the instruction I gave them. I wanted to give the students as much time a possible to build in our limited 30 minutes. The class was divided into teams of two, and each pair was tasked to create a building, or any other structure. Th tallest structure would get a prize, and the prettiest structure would get a prize. The additional challenge was to build a structure taller than their teachers could build. (The teachers seemed as excited as the kids were to participate.) About thirty seconds into the competition, I noticed one team building a rather large 2–D house flat on the floor, and I had to add the stipulation that the buildings had to be free standing which meant they could not be flat on the floor.
The tallest building was about 15 inches. (The teachers' building was about 18 inches, but due to the last minute push for extra height, the building fell over.) There were so many buildings cool that I couldn't choose one “prettiest building” winner; I ended up choosing three. One was a pretty average square tower, but they had added a gumdrop spire at the top to give it extra height. It made me laugh because it was such a “real-life” technique architects use to add height to their buildings. Another prettiest building winner was a truss bridge. I think it was the only “non-building” structure. It was constructed with excellent craftsmanship. It was also one of two or three structures that used mainly triangles. I was surprised that, despite our discussion of how triangles are stronger than squares, there were so few teams that used triangles. The last prettiest building winner was probably my favorite if I had to pick one. It was one of the shortest buildings, but it was also the most unique. It was the only building that was asymmetrical. It was made of a bunch of overlapping triangles, different sizes, different angles, different ways of overlapping. It was really cool. I'm so bummed that in the hectic wrap-up, it was the only one of the four winners that I didn't get a picture of. Each of the winners received a children's illustrated classic novel.
For the wrap-up, I showed them a geodesic dome that I built which received lots of ooh's and aah's. I briefly mentioned Buckminster Fuller and Epcot and how geodesic domes provide the maximum interior space while using the minimum surface material.
The last of my handful of posters for the before and after presentations was a poster titled: “Opportunities.” I wanted to inspire them. I told them about the Governor's Honors Program which was a long way off in high school, but if they work hard now, they could get invited to spend six weeks, free of charge, at a summer program learning engineering, art, sciences, drama, and a dozen other things. I told them about MIT's MITES (Minority Introduction to Engineering and Sciences) Program, which was also a long ways off for them, but MIT is one the best schools in the country and is a great goal to aspire to. Finally, I told them about the FIRST Robotics Competition that was open to anyone from kindergarten to high school, a competition, where, at the high school level, you could earn scholarships ranging from a couple hundred dollars to full college tuition for four years! I was disappointed to see mostly indifferent, unenthusiastic faces when I was telling the students these opportunities. The vibe I was getting was that they weren't interested in these amazing opportunities. I hope I was wrong. I hope at least one of those forty-eight students was inspired to study hard and pursue one of these, or many other, fantastic opportunities. If I could, I would have like to explore this disinterest.
In reflection, I wish I could have split the lesson and the actual building into two sessions to have more time for each. The teachers helped me measure the tallest buildings and they only had time to measure the buildings that they eyeballed as among the tallest. I think some of the students thought this was unfair. If we had more time, it would have been good to measure every building. However, overall, it was a great lesson where the kids learned and had fun.
Here are pictures of some of the buildings:
The Tallest Building
The Building with the Spire
The Truss Bridge
It turns out this week is the school's February break. I'm bummed about it because I was really excited that GAGE this week fell on Chinese New Year. Before I found out school was out, I had bought a hundred chocolate gold coins. I was going to put each coin a “hongbao,” or red envelope, and explain to the students that Chinese children receive hongbaos filled with money from parents and other elders during Chinese New Year and other special occasions for good luck. I was really looking forward to the kids getting hongbaos filled with chocolate money. Oh well, now I have to figure out what to do with a hundred chocolate medallions.
GAGE was canceled last week because the school had a snow day. To make up for it, we had the best GAGE lesson so far this year! The children are studying economics in class so John had the idea of holding a cookie auction. (He and his wife Donna sorted about 300 cookies into individual ziplock bags!) The students were each given ten cents and were split into groups of about seventeen, and each group had a adult with a grocery bag full of three types of cookies: generic cookies, regular Oreos, and chocolate Oreos. Each cookie, regardless of type, was auctioned for five cents. There were two rounds of auctioning, and each student was given the chance to buy zero, one or two cookies in each round. Although we told the students there were three types of cookies, we did not tell them what each type was or when each type would be auctioned. The generic cookies were auctioned first, then the regular Oreos, and finally the best cookies, the chocolate Oreos. The idea of the order of cookies auctioned was to teach the concept of buyer's remorse.
After the two rounds of auctioning, we created an open market where the students were allowed to trade with each other for whatever price they agreed on. This was all really interesting to observe. One little girl immediately turned around and sold the two cookies she bought for one penny each. Despite the overall loss of eight cents, she seemed really happy to make a trade with her classmates. By the end of the open market, she had somehow miraculously traded her two pennies to other students and regained her original two cookies. There was one student who doubled her net worth from the ten cents she was given to a total of twenty-one cents by the time trading was over. There was another student who doubled his net worth from the original two cookies he was able to purchase to own a total of four cookies by the end of trading.
To wrap up the lesson, the whole group came back together, and each of the teachers shared one observation, and the two students with the highest number of pennies and cookies, respectively, were also asked on stage to share their strategies.
It's great to finally be back at GAGE again today after a long hiatus due to field trips, spring break, testing, and my being out of town. Luckily, today was towards the end of the weird testing schedule so we had more than our usual half hour for GAGE.
Since yesterday was Earth Day, the topic this week was naturally, the Solar System. I created a 26-foot-in-diameter “model” of the solar system using NASA's bead activity model. They wisely put all of their planets on one string. I wanted mine to look more like a circle so I put each planet on its own string which took a ridiculous amount of time to make, and almost as long to set up. Thank goodness Mrs. M and Mrs. G showed up a bit early and helped me set up the model while we waited for the other two classes to arrive and get settled.
Fun fact: the distance from the earth to the sun is almost 93 million miles. Assuming we had a “special” school bus that could drive from earth to the sun but could only travel at my non-scientific estimate of a school bus' average speed of 30 miles per hour, how long do you think it'd take to get to the sun? I took three guesses from the kids, and the highest guess was 8 years. The students were pretty shocked to find out it'd take about 354 years. One girl shouted, “we'd all be dead!”
For the second half of the lesson, we shot film canister rockets!!! It's really easy to do, and a ton of fun! All that's needed are: little bit of water, half a tablet of Alka-Seltzer, and a film canister from the good ole pre-digital days. (Note: some sites that outline this activity say any antacid works, but you have to get the kind that has sodium bicarbonate as the active ingredient, since the antacids made of calcium carbonate will not work.) Several of the canisters shot a good ten feet in the air. The kids loved it! I took a video (which I'll try to post later) of about 80 kids shooting about 40 canisters into the sky. One boy was so excited he forgot to put the canister on the ground before running away and had to run back to leave the canister. It was pretty funny.
Building off of last week's topic of Planets, the topic this week was Pollution. In class, the students learned about the Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean so I was asked to speak about Pollution. I confess I wasn't too excited about the topic in the beginning; I'm usually mindful about recycling, but I'm not an eager proponent. I struggled to come up with an interesting way to teach the topic. Fortuitously, I came across some great resources.
First, I started the lesson with a few facts about pollution, about how there's 7 billion pounds of non-recyclable plastic produced a year and how only 7 percent of it is recycled. I like data, maybe because I'm numbers person, or maybe because of my previous training in research. However, I recently realized that these numbers probably mean next to nothing to my third-graders. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I know exactly what 7 billion pounds of plastic looks like. In an attempt to cater to my audience, I told the students that if only 7 percent of plastic is recycled, that's like saying if there were a hundred students (and the third-grade class is approximately a hundred students), it means out of all the students, only seven people decided to recycle. I hope that made a bit more sense to them.
I also try to come up with visual examples, or activities that the kids can do whenever possible. So next, I did a quick demonstration. I brought out a large jar of clear water, and I explained how the ocean is like the water. There's a lot of water, and it was (originally) clean. Then, I squeezed a single drop of red food coloring into the jar and gave the jar a swirl. The water had a faint red tint. I explained how a tiny bit of pollution, just like the tiny drop of food coloring, hurts the whole ocean. This they could see and understand.
Next, I did Discovery Education's Protecting Our Planet lesson. The kids really enjoyed this activity. Some were excited to be the animals that ate the plants although one girl came up to me and told me she was very excited to be a plant because the dress she was wearing was plants. I probably could have stopped the lesson here, (the half hour goes by so quickly!) but I wanted to squeeze in one more activity. Luckily, Ms. M and Ms. G were flexible with time.
So a little bit of background: my job right now is that I tutor kids one-on-one at a tutoring academy. Most of the students I work with are in high school, but I have one elementary school student who I work with somewhat regularly in reading and in math. Yesterday, we read a passage together that was written from the perspective of a cat who was snuggling in a suitcase while referring to his humans as his “pets.” The exercise with the passage was for the student to write a paragraph from the point of view of one of his pets. We both had a ton of fun with this activity, and it was probably the best one so far in that book. As I was planning the lesson on pollution, I thought of this activity and decided adapt this lesson for my third-graders for GAGE. In my research, I came across this picture from Green Peace's site that really struck me.
I showed the third-graders this picture and told them that this bird's name is Sally the Seabird. I told them that when Sally the Seabird heard that I was going to talk to them about pollution, she wrote me a letter to read to them. The letter went something like:
Dear Hope,
I heard you were speaking to Ms. M and Ms. G's third-grade class about pollution. I recently had a very scary accident involving pollution. As you know, my life as a seabird is pretty great and carefree. I get to fly over the blue ocean with the wind to my face, and I get to each whatever fish looks yummy from the ocean. Recently, I thought I saw a green fish. When I swooped down to catch it, it turned out the fish wasn't a fish. It was a net! I got my neck stuck in the net, and I was very afraid. My friend Sam the Seabird tried to help me pull the net off, but that only made things worse because the net started choking me. Luckily, this photographer saw us and freed me from the net. It was a close call! I'm a lot more careful now about what I try to eat, but the pollution in the ocean continues to hurt me and my friends. Can you talk to Ms. M and Ms. G's third-grade class about pollution and ask them what they can do to stop pollution? Thanks!
Love,
Sally the Seabird
The kids loved the letter! Although, one girl remarked, “Seabirds can't write letters!” I wanted to see what their ideas to stop pollution were so the final part of the lesson was for the students to get into pairs and write a letter to Sally the Seabird telling her what they plan to do about pollution. I was so impressed with the letters the kids wrote! They were very thoughtful: sympathizing with Sally the Seabird's traumatic accident, praising her beautiful feathers, and offering ways to reduce pollution. I'll end this post with my favorite letter, from two boys (one of whom was one of the winners of the Gumdrop Challenge back in February):
Dear Sally the Seabird,
We came up with an idea to encourage people to recycle. We will do so by making a video about some stories that will get people to recycle. If it doesn't work out, we will have a backup plan. Our backup plan will be – we'll contact President Obama and tell him our pollution problem and we will tell him he should contact the other presidents to tell their people to not pollute the Earth.
[Signed] L. and K.
The letter last week from L. and K. to Sally the Seabird was so brilliant that we decided to put part of it into action. The two boys suggested two things they could do to help fight pollution so for GAGE this week, we, as a whole class, carried out one of their plans. (I'm not going to say which one, though.) It took much longer than our usual time allotment for GAGE; luckily, this is one of the last weeks of the school year so we had a lot more leeway than usual with time. I hope the students got a taste of what it's like to come up with a great idea and then make it happen. Through the process, I hope they all feel empowered to achieve their dreams.