Revisiting the Last Kid Picked

Economics.  I thought it would be awesome at the beginning of the year.  But, sheesh.  I don't know gang.  Maybe it deserves to be the last kid picked.  Maybe it really is the worst player in gym class...

Not to say that the kids did not have  a great time creating the town this year.  And, to be fair, I do have the whole rest of the year to get my act together- but the concepts seem a bit too hard for my kids at the beginning of the year.  So it wasn't as fun as it was last year, and we haven't accomplished as much.

It's a little tough on me too this year since I am hosting an addition five kids during that hour so I'm sporting 28 at the end of the day.  But my teammies who are not sporting the extra five kids are saying similar things.  They did not have as much fun with it this year as we did last year.  So poop.

One thing I did come across this year that was great was this book by Paul Fleischman.  Click on the picture to go to Amazon.com.  This was a great read-aloud for actually creating a civilization.  My kids were able to get the whole concept of a main crop after hearing this story.  And it got them excited about the idea of creating a different language and what not.  The book is pretty cerebral though- so it's not a "quick" read-aloud for a second grade crowd.  Much better done over a few days so they can chew over the information.

It did help that we had two weeks of Citizenship lessons before we started.  This economics curriculum is part of my PYP planner How We Organize Ourselves.  They were completely into the idea of community and citizen responsibility as we began this unit.  It also helped that we had been creating class mission and vision statements at this same time- because they were able to apply this to their pretend town.  They did decide on calling the town Super Mooseville, and they chose to have a lake town, which specializes in fish, corn, and mango, and our power is generated through wind mills.  I am hoping to be able to consistently use our town in other curriculum areas as a touching point.  We'll see how that goes.  The kids voted on what they wanted people to say about their town, and they came up with the following.  I had to help them out with the words multi-cultural and globally minded because they didn't have the vocabulary, but it was completely their idea that they wanted a place where no one felt different or unaccepted because of their race or skin color.

This has also helped me separate my kids into three project groups, since they each have expressed interest in one of the three concepts as being of interest to them.  My Clean Committee is currently working on designing a recycling center and plans to actually show it to our county recycling center. 

It's definitely going to be a year long project with this town- and I hope that over time I start to have more fun with it- but at the moment, the momentum is a bit slow.