#msshanteler

[kidsmartnola]

ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy 7th Grade ELA + Theatre Ms. King / Ms. Shanteler

Ms. Shanteler’s students are reading The Giver in ELA, and thinking about the elements that make up a community. We decided to develop a mock community, and have been exploring communication and listening skills, conflict management, team-building, and self-care. We are practicing these things in order to gather strategies for creating a community that reflects our shared values, and strives to be a place where our motto “Enough For All” is in place.

Here, the students brainstormed ideal values or challenges they wanted to address in the categories of Education, Jobs, Housing, Health Care, Civic Duties, and Laws. They then did a gallery walk of each other’s ideas, and either checked ideas they agreed with, or asked further questions about the ideas that needed clarification.

This happened after our daily meditation- which is something we are proud of, because we are becoming leaders in managing our physical and emotional selves!

[kidsmartnola]

ReNew Cultural Arts Academy (RCAA) 7th Grade, Storytelling & ELA Ms. Renee/ Ms. Shantler 

In Ms. Shantler’s ELA class, students are learning about Claudette Colvin, the 15-year-old girl who refused to give up her seat on the bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama nine months before Rosa Parks took the same action. Students read several articles, including Colvin’s first person account, about that day on the bus in 1955. Colvin was arrested and eventually acted as a witness on the Supreme Court case that ordered Montgomery to end segregation in transportation. 

After reading several articles, students were asked to imagine the other people who were on the bus that day. Where were they coming from? What was their personal background? What are some emotional experiences they could have been having in this moment and why? Students began to create an “untold story” of an imagined character who could have been on the bus that day. They created a profile that included their age, profession, where they were coming from and where they were going, and some information about their history. From there, students created a detailed portrait and wrote a story that imagined what someone else who was on the bus that day might have been feeling and any actions this moment inspired for them. Did they speak up? Did they stay quiet? Did they get off of the bus at the next stop? Why did they make the choices they made? Where were they coming from that might have informed this? 

The idea behind this lesson was to imagine different perspectives, and other points of view. From a social/emotional perspective, this lesson intended to create empathy in that students consider why people make might make the choices they do. Can someone be feeling inspired and afraid at the same time? How do we look at the complexities of the emotional experience and imagine them outside of ourselves?