Empathy

As a teacher I seem to repeat, "How do you think that might make him/her feel?"

As much as we say it some kids just seem to lack that understanding. They seem to have trouble putting them selves in someone else's shoes. 

I had a fall at school a little while ago. It was unpleasant, my ankle hurt but that wasn't what upset me the most. I happened to fall over in front of my class. Now, most of my kids were lovely. They asked if I was o.k. and tried to help me up. There was one little charmer who decided to point and laugh, not only laugh as a shock reaction, I might add, but continuous laughter even after seeing that I was in pain.

This has been on my mind for a little while. It got me thinking about empathy (the intellectual identification with or vicarious experience of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another). 

So if this is a skill that doesn't come so easily to others, how do we teach it? 

My class had a discussion today about empathy and what it means. We did some role play activities to demonstrate how we might show empathy towards others. I mentioned "treat others as you want to be treated," quote that all of us have heard many times. After all this I still wan't sure if my message sunk in. 

I think this is a vital skill for everyone to learn if they are to function successfully in society. 

This triggered me to read a little about the development of empathy in children.

I found out that this is a skill that children learn, it is not something that comes to them naturally. 

From the articles I read there seemed to be a specific theme: when teaching children about empathy the outcome has to feel good and the problem has to be broken down for them to understand. 

It seems more complicated than I first thought. 

Here's my question though.... is it solely up to the teachers to teach their students a skill such as empathy or is it the responsibility of the family? On the other hand what happens when those skills aren't being taught at home?

Khan Acadamy

Was just watching 60 minutes and saw something that blew my mind.
I don't know if anyone else has heard of KhanAcadamy but I think we could be onto something here.
Here's the link: http://www.khanacademy.org/
Watching the interview with Sal Khan, who started it all, I could hear my own beliefs about education. Sal began posting online videos to help a relative with some school concepts they were finding difficult.  This is where the online classroom idea began. Sal began creating videos that cover a huge amount of topics from basic addition to Astronomy.
What struck a note with me though was not the incredible amount of published content that I could use in my classroom, but what Sal was saying about teaching. Sal believes that this could be used to help  the kids who are struggling with some concepts. The children can work at their own pace to fill the gaps they might have and then move on to the next concept when they are ready. The same goes for the children who are racing ahead of the others. It doesn't seem fair for them to be limited by what their class understands. It can be like having an extra teacher in the room to help explain some concepts to the children. Each video then gives the children an opportunity to practice each concept. The children can learn at their pace and can have content covered as many times as they need.
The only problem I see, is that the lessons don't use the numeracy project strategies, so could be a little hard to use in a primary school in NZ.  I see this as a useful tool to extend GATE students further. It can also be a great tool for intermediate schools. Would be interesting what teachers in NZ make of this. What do you think?

Authentic Learning

When I was a kid I remember learning about stuff but never really connecting the learning to real life. Some of the topics we learned about didn't really seem real.
I must say that I work in an amazing school! We had decided to teach the children about their contributions to the world around them. So to teach the children about charity we had the Auckland rescue Helicopter fly into school, we will be having the flying simulator in at school so the children can learn how to fly, we will also be going to visit the helicopter hanger and that's all just this term.
I have never seen the children so excited and motivated to learn and so willing to put so much effort into helping others.
We are planning a big fundraising event for our charity of choice (Rescue Helicopter) and the ideas that the children are coming up with are fantastic. They have been writing about their experiences of seeing the helicopter fly into the school, they have been researching different items you can hire for fundraising, they have been enquiring about the costs, they have been reading about the Trust and they have been waving money collection buckets to raise funds for this charity.
This is real topic study! This has soaked through every subject area in our class and the learning that the children are gaining is phenomenal.

Science

Science is amazing. It makes us questions everything. Why is the sky blue? How does our heart work? How does a light bulb produce light?
I've been thinking about my kids wonderings lately ... so I thought I'd answer a couple of their questions and in the process add some more.
My class went to the Science Road Show yesterday and we had a blast. Having that exposure to science experiments and not only looking at them but being able to touch and explore, filled my kids with wonder. It was fantastic to see them so excited about learning. They wanted to see everything, touch everything, understand everything.
I think we need to expose our kids to science more often. They don't have enough opportunities to experiment at such a young age.
Today that was my mission.
Who would have thought that water and a few paperclips could achieve just that.
Today I carefully placed one single paperclip into a container of water and asked the kids to do the same.
It took them a long time to figure out how to do it but they managed.
In the process we discussed how this was possible.
Here is what they understood from it all:

All we needed were some paperclips and containers with water. Now there really no excuse to experiment!

Wonderings

 A little while ago I created a wonder window in my class.

Here the children can write their wonderings. Anything that comes to mind that they want to know about. The other day I took a moment to have a really good look at these wonderings and there were some amazing questions there. For example: Why is static electricity called static, because static means staying still? or Why are we human? Why don't ships sink? Who made the first movie? Why is the sky blue? ... etc
There is some great thinking there. I found that the kids are full of fantastic wonderings. They are always questioning the worlds around them. They want to know how things work, why things happen and so on.
I do wonder sometimes if we do our kids justice? How often do we actually take the time to listen to what they say and what they ask?
It got me thinking about child directed learning and what we have been trying to move towards in our classroom. We strive to make our students passionate seekers of knowledge.

Graphic organisers

As I mentioned before, we've been learning about charities.  The charity we have been focussing on is Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust. 

Today we looked at how helicopters work. Instead of telling the kids to display what they learned in their books I got the kids to show their work in a template I created using Draw in Google Docs.

The children collected the information about the forces at play and placed their findings in the template. I thought that four medium sized boxes would be enough space for the children to show their understanding without intimidating those who don't like to write. Graphic organisers are great like that. 

I was pleasantly surprised. The discussions that the children were having were fantastic and even my more reluctant writers displayed their what they learned. Most filled the boxes I gave them and added more because I just didn't give them enough space as I was later told.

This is the template I created:

This is what some of my kids created:

So what do you think? I was blown away!

Genius

One of my colleagues  mentioned this quote to me,
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” 
― Albert Einstein

It really made me think!

I  think that every child has something that they are great at. They are not always the best writers or mathematicians or readers (which is what we test in school) but they can be amazing singers, painters, dancers, problem solvers, lateral thinkers and more.
Do we make these children feel valued?