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, Activity 3, and Activity 4.

My last day for Junior Achievement was Wednesday, Dec. 2 (the class had a field trip on Yuesday). This was another activity that I modified quite a bit. Nevertheless, I think it was the most lame of the activities.
Today’s activity was about how money moves through a community.
It was supposed to go like this:

• Choose 8 kids to sit in a circle and give them a quarter
  
• Play an audio tape with a song on it
  The song describes the path of a quarter through the community.
  
• Kids pass the quarter around the circle with the song while everyone follows along on their worksheet.
  

Boorrring

So, I changed things:

First off, I didn’t like the quarter. Too small, too difficult to see. Also, too real for our imaginary community.

I found an image of a quarter on the web, blew it up to about 7″ across, printed two, cut them out and pasted them to a cardboard circle. So I had a two-faced quarter about the size of a desert plate.

Then I prepared seven “name tags” – full sheets of paper with the name and job of each “actor” in the community written in 108 pt type: Tommy at the Bank, Harry at the Market, Fiona at the Flower Cart. I chose 7 volunteers to play the parts and I dispersed them randomly around the room.

I had the rest of the kids read parts of the story. This allowed everyone to participate. Each time the quarter went to someone else, the kid who had it got up and delivered it to the next person.
After we finished, I asked about some of the unusual or difficult words in the story and we discussed what the words meant.

Although the class was, as usual, noisy, much of that was kids whispering hints about the story their classmates were reading. Some read better (or louder) than others of course.

One mistake I made was not to plan for kids playing “parts” to read. Everyone wanted to read… even the ones who talk too softly for the human ear to hear 😉 If I had this to do over again, every kid would be given a chance to read.

---

I am supposed to hand out “certificates of achievement” after the last session, so after the third session, I asked the teacher for a list of the student’s names. I used Apple Works (Draw) to arrange and space the text, then printed each student’s name (along with the school name and date) on a certificate. I then signed and asked the teacher to sign today.

At Rich’s suggestion I printed three additional certificates – one for me, one for the teacher, and one for the principal (where name was “Miss Glaser’s Second Grade”).

I was very pleased that the certificates were very close to standard 8.5 x 11 size; they were fairly easy to run through the printer.