::A Geek in Korea::

Our manager wanted to give the chance for the students to feel they "owned" their classrooms, so he told us he was going to prepare signs for the students, take their pictures, and then arrange them on our walls for us. He didn’t take pictures. He didn’t buy the materials. He didn’t prepare anything, and actually changed the "I will do everything," to "You will do everything," on the planning board. Seeing as I was going to do this as a class activity, I stepped up and offered to buy the paper myself if he would repay me. I went to the local supply store, got enough paper for all of the teachers classes (or, at least I hope I did), and some big thick color markers.

I tried to pick colors based on my class names. Today my classes were Lilac, Daisy, Banana, and Grape. These are easy, as all of them have a distinct colors. My first two classes, Lilac and Daisy, are full of young children. They couldn’t do their own art for the large board, so I told them to create individual "name cards" they could decorate. They colored these while I drew their respective flowers on the paper. They were very impressed with my artwork. I thought it came out pretty well. They got to choose the location of the signs. I will put them up tomorrow before class.

My older class, Grape, was supposed to make a family tree in class today. I was going to do the sign project later, but some of the students actually finished their family tree before  they came to class. Instead of telling those kids to go read their storybook, I pooled them into a "sign project committee". Their job was to create designs, choose the features of the sign, and ultimately make the sign themselves. I helped them with the initial spelling and requirements of what had to be on the sign.

They made the design themselves, which looked really good. They chose to use parts from different people’s work, and colored everything together. It was awesome to see the entire class giving ideas, sharing resources, and doings what they could to make the project work. They were working hard since they felt they owned part of the classroom, and this represented them. Teamwork, effort, results. Best of all, as they worked, more people got finished with their assignment for class. These students could join in and give ideas or help. Soon the entire class was squashed around the table admiring what they had done. When they found a mistake on something they had written, they used some creativity to fix it instead of complaining to each other.

I really liked this method of getting students involved in class. I’ll be looking for more ways to include it in my teaching style when appropriate.