Mentoring Girls... To Learn and Give Back

As some of you may know, the 8th graders are currently doing SJCU work: Social Justice Cultural Understanding. In SJCU, we learn about different cultures, biases, and how to overcome and differentiate myths and facts. Previously in SJCU, we read excerpts from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot. We read and annotated text, held class discussions, and did projects about Henrietta Lacks' story, and the racism involved.

On Wednesday, we started something new and exciting in SJCU! We are mentoring to 4th and 5th grade girls at Madrona K-8 school and Thurgood Marshall elementary school in areas of reading, writing and math. The goal of this is to empower these young girls, because this age is usually the time when girls start to not speak up in class, and teachers pay more attention to boys. Another goal, is for us to grow more culturally aware. The two schools are very culturally different rom us, and we'll learn from these girls about their own culture, as much as they will about us.

I think it will be a really great experience for us, as well as the girls. At Thurgood, we'll be doing more school work from all over, and at Madrona we will focus on writing and art. If you are a parent, ask your daughter what school she goes to!

Thanks for reading, and we will keep posting about how our experiences are going with empowering girls at these elementary schools. We will be continuing for the whole year, on every other Wednesday morning.

Thanks for reading!

Unofficial Dress Up Day in 8th Grade

The Most Perfect Worlds

Last Thursday, twenty nine "perfect worlds" were in our classroom! The Language Arts assignment was to create our own perfect world- with the perfect political system, monetary setup, the perfect environment, the choice of animals or not... etc. Almost everyone had a certain "theme" to theirs: there was a candy land world, world of movies and entertainment, a stress free world, music world, paradise/island worlds, desserts and sweets world... and many others!

There were four sections to the project, and we had eight weeks to complete it. First section was answering the questions (for example, what are the holidays/traditions?) in a creative way, like in a guidebook, story, or magazine. The second section was to write a "day in the life" story about a teenage girl in our world. Third, was to create an overhead map- many students got very creative at this part; There were collages, maps made of food, drawings, dioramas, etc. The final section was to include at least ten vocabulary words of our world, and what they mean and how to use them.

It was a super fun assignment, and it was great to have so much freedom with it. How many other students from other schools get to create their perfect world they would love to live in, and share it with the community (other grades and faculty came in to view them)? Although this was a challenging academic project- it was hard to think of things such as the political system: it's definitely challenging to think of a completely perfect way to run your world!

We all worked hard on the project, and spent many hours working, although some people learned that although we had two months to finish, we have to make our own benchmarks and use all of the time given.

Thanks for reading about the 8th grade's perfect worlds!