Slightly Off KIlter

I volunteered for Junior Achievement in November #151; five Tuesday, half an hour each, in a local second grade class. You can read the whys and wherefores my regular weblog (
Part 1 and Part 2) and about the previous activities here: (Activity 1, Activity 2, and Activity 3

This was my 4th Junior Achievement day. I made a lot of changes to this activity. I’ve been finding (ever since the Disaster of the Donut Shop) that the activities work much better if I don’t follow them as written.

The original was supposed to go like this:

1. there’s an empty store in our Imaginary Community. Three candidates for mayor each suggest a business:
   
2. The candidates propose: a skate park, an animal shelter, a toy store
   
3. The kids, in small groups, discuss the “plusses and minuses” of one type of business and record what they talk about. “Divide the class into six group; assign two groups to each mayor”.
   
4. The volunteer writes the students’ ideas on a “Decision Tree” chart taped to the wall
   
5. The students vote for mayor using prepared “ballots”. The volunteer and the teacher tally the votes.
   

Let’s go through what’s wrong with this Activity as designed.

1. Three candidates for mayor? This is rather indirect, even for me. This is second grade. What’s wrong with voting for your choice of business? Why involve a second layer of confusion by bringing mayors into the picture?
   

   
   

2. I think the kids will have more fun if they propose suggestions for a business to put into the empty store.
   

   
   

3. Second graders in small groups present a bit of an organizational problem. Second graders in small groups do not have experience with “discussion”. Second graders are not facile at “recording ideas”. This is not second grade work.
   

   
   

4. The Decision “tree” is a tree only in that’s what is drawn on the background. For someone like me, with a background in graph theory, computer science, etc, there is nothing “treelike” about this decision process.
   

   
   Even if this were a true decision tree, second grade isn’t the place to introduce the concept.
   

   
   

5. The students vote… that’s easy enough, aside from the “mayor” part (see #1)
   

I made some changes.

1. First of all, I left out the mayors entirely. I even re-did the ballots in a “paint” package and printed them on a color printer. The new ballots listed choices for Business 1, Business 2, and Business 3.
   

   
   

2. Next, I let the kids suggest businesses to go into the empty store. my class has 5 tables so I took a suggestion from each table. Then I narrowed the list to three. The narrowing turned out to be easy as two of the suggestions were a bank and a library (and our community already has those.) I had covered the pre-printed business names on the “Decision” chart so I could write our choices in the spaces.
   

   
   

3. Instead of small group work, I had the kids come sit closer to the front of the room, then we talked about good and bad things for each type of store. Our stores were a toy store, a food court, and a coffee bar.
   

   
   

4. Then we voted. They liked that part (as well as the “I Voted” sticker they each received). Surprisingly, the coffee bar was the clear winner. I said “But you guys don’t even drink coffee!” They told me why:
   
   
   
   • “Starbucks has cookies.”
     
   • “I drink frappachinos.”
     
   • “If you feel hungry, sometimes you’re really just thirsty.”
     
   • “What if I wanted to go the the toy store but my friends wanted to go to the coffee bar?”