707's Community Building Activity

Even though I'm sad to know this will be our last month with the College Champions program, I am so pleased with the progress I have observed from my students and extremely impressed with their participation and effort throughout this month's activity.  On the first lesson for Community, the students worked as a group to brainstorm a list of activities we could do in our community and they came up with A LOT of ideas.  All of their ideas were great but would have required an earlier start date or materials that are not available at this time.

After revising our plan, I explained to students that we would have to take it down a notch but still fulfill the requirement of working within our community participating in a meaningful activity.  As the students listed a new set of ideas, the words "Baldi" and "PSSA" came up a lot.  We decided as a group, that the students of Baldi needed some encouragement for the upcoming PSSA.  Therefore 707 created raps, chants, poems, and songs to be shared over the loud speaker during morning announcements for each day of testing.

Each table created their own chant, song, poem, or rap and presented their ideas to the entire class.  Compared to the start of College Champions, I noticed students becoming more comfortable speaking in front of the class.  Each table presented their chant to the class, the rest of the class provided feedback, and then each group revised their chant based on the suggestions.  We practiced the chants every Wednesday and began them yesterday with the start of testing.

Our first group, Alieu, Brittany, Jose, and Maab, met me in the office upon their arrival.  I brought my bongo to school because the students created a beat to go along with the chant.  Usually one of the students would giggle or be off beat during practice but during announcements they did a phenomenal job! (see video)  We could've been louder (according to the rest of 707), so today's group made sure to speak loudly and clearly into the microphone.  I'm excited to see how the other groups do throughout the next two weeks.

Even though this seems like such a small community project, the kids have exuded a sense of pride that I haven't seen before. This project has built a sense of community within our classroom which was my main goal when applying for this program.  I look forward to incorporating more lessons on community throughout the rest of the school year!