Prayers in a bag

To end our To Kill a Mockingbird unit, I wanted to have a Flex plan that was applied to the social ladder. The Freshmen class chose to work with elderly folks. We wanted to try to create a way to let elderly people know that they are important folks in our society.
Our first plan was to go to Prairie Ridge several times to create a relationship with them. That fell through. I have too many Freshmen, and I have the Freshmen classes spread out over the day and not at good nursing home times. After about a month of trying to come up with an idea, the activities director at Prairie Ridge thought that my students could simply pray for the residents. But it was not as simple as it sounds. The Freshmen picked a person. The goal was to write three prayers a week. At the end of the week, we discovered some wrote the prayers for the wrong person. We even had wrong names (even though they had a list).

  So some residents got 6 prayers, while another just received one. At the end of the week we put those prayers in an envelope  and gave them to the Ridge. For the next week, I just went down the list. Did that go any better?  Not really. Again, several students wrote the wrong person again!  (We need to work on listening skills! ) This time they put their prayers in a card of their own. Again, they were delivered to the Ridge.
Today I received two very sweet notes from some residents. One uses our prayers as a morning devotion. Another one thanked us for the prayers. "It is a blessing to be remembered," is what he wrote. It was touching.
Like most things in life, this is not what we set out to do. Yet, it has been a blessing and good reminder. So often in life we try to do all these really big things, and while doing that we often forget about the very powerful and simple gift of prayer. My deep hope is that my Freshmen will remember this simple Flex activity and bring that into their everyday lives. My deep hope is that I will remember that too.

The Mystery Unit-making it real.

    For several years now, I've been trying to TfT my Freshmen mystery unit. We have found over the years that if there is one place that non-fiction and fiction collide, it's with mysteries or solving crimes. This year we read several fiction stories, a fiction play and a non-fiction story. We also viewed fiction and non-fiction mystery stories. But in order to make it a little more real, we invited the experts into the class. After reading a story about a car accident, Deputy Waylon Pollema visited class with a little mystery of his own. He shared a car accident and pictures with the students to see if they could unwrap the mystery of the accident. What the victims told and what the accident scene told were not the same thing.

After all our reading, we ended our unit with a crime of our own. Three freshmen committed a set up crime at school. Through the use of Deputy Nate Huizenga and Deputy Pollema, eye witnesses, evidence left behind, and the school camera, the freshmen had to solve the mystery. It was fun to watch them unravel the evidence.






I was also quite surprised how "knowing the story", my storyline, fit with this unit. Every time we looked at a story, fiction or non-fiction, the idea of looking at the entire story played in important role.