And the Same Teacher Performs Yet Another Miracle

My Wednesdays are always an adventure. I have not co taught with this mentee for several weeks. There does not seem to be a need.  I still go to the class, offer my bit of knowledge, and the kids make me feel like a hero.  Why? Because this teacher makes every day an adventure in learning and they can hardly wait to be in his classroom. I have told him that 20 years from now these kids are going to reflect on their school years and always remember the experience they had in his classroom.


I dont have pictures handy of a steller class he had last week. He was teaching 
What he did was ask the students 'who has an aquarium at home'. When he determined that 12 of them did, then he asked each of those students to bring an empty jam jar to class the next day. He then purchased 12 fish for an aquarium, fish food, and water de-chlorination.  At school, with the class, he took the jars, they filled them with water, they de-chlorinated the water and let it become habitable for the fish, dropped a fish into each jar, allowed the students to feed the fish appropriate amounts of food and then take them home to join the fish in their own aquariums.  What did the students learn? They learned a lesson on reusing  - a jam jar can be a mini aquarium; they learned respect and care of living things; they learned the value of potable water.  And most of all, they had fun doing it.

Now, for the recent Language Art and Project Based Learning he produced. I gave some mentees kits to put together this one. I left this teacher with his own devices.  The others needed help in making the kits glitzy because they did not have the skills to take a very plain object and make it into a fun activity. All he used was a simple lined notebook and a RM2 little blonde doll he named Suzy.  Turns out Suzy is very shy and only talked directly to him, but he passes on the message to the students, who take the book and a pencil and write letters to Suzy. She, still being shy, only writes an e-mail to the teacher, which he copies and pastes in the book in response to the student's letters. They can hardly wait for their own turn to write to Suzy.  It is priceless.