The Best Teachers are Responsive Teachers

I believe the best teachers are those who respond diligently and with honesty to children's questions, concerns, and interests.  While we do have a curriculum to follow, I know that if I am able to develop units that can meet the standards, and follow the interests of the students, not only will my second graders learn more- but they will be actively engaged in the learning process and be more willing to take on challenges enthusiastically.

With Steven Soderbergh's new movie Contagion starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and a plethora of Hollywood A-Listers, hitting theaters this week, a child asked me the question, "what does it mean, contagion?"  Of course, this was Number 4, who always asks questions at the oddest times, twisting the topic in a completely different direction (we were talking about Johnny Appleseed at the time.) Suddenly, several hands went up.  They had seen the previews for the movie as well, and wondered what was so contagious that they would make a movie about it.

Well, good question Number 4.  Let's find out what a plague is, and take it from there.  I began a new read aloud,

This book clearly explains plagues through history and introduces to children the concept of mass-death due to illness that spreads rapidly. While it is meant for children in 5th grade and up, I know that my students can understand the concepts in the book with careful explanations. They were fascinated, and listened in complete silence as I read to them about the bubonic plague.

After reading the first chapter of the book, we started a math problem on exponential numbers.  Of course, my second graders are barely adding single digits on their fingers, but nonetheless, this lesson was interesting to them, and had them adding up every unifix cube in the classroom.

I said, if one red unifix cube was sick, and spread the illness to another unifix cube, how many would be sick?

Two, of course, the children realized.

Well, what if each of those unifix cubes got another unifix cube sick? Then how many would be sick?

Hmm, four! They caught on pretty quickly.

We kept counting! Now, if those four spread it to one person each, that would be eight.  Then sixteen. We kept going, and pretty soon we had a chain that went all the way down the hall!

Just one sick person, and soon we got to 256 people sick from just one person! It took only 8 steps, and soon there was as many people sick as the whole population of our school! The kids could have probably gone longer, but we already had used all of our unifix cubes, and the ones from the Second Grade Sleuth class.

On Fridays, I try to do a fun art project in the afternoon.  This week, we made rat bookmarks to represent the rats which were part of the cause of the Black Death.

Next week, we will begin exploring the probability of an eventual zombie plague. Now that the students have some preliminary information on the cause of real plagues, we can start to examine the theoretical plagues that we may one day face.

By the way, I realized today that I now have 100 followers! Thank you to all my readers who share, comment and read my blog.  I am just so glad that people are interested in my little classroom in middle America enough to read.

Thanks again, everyone!

Sincerely,

Rosie Kaplan