I left him at the kitchen table while I went to take a shower. Upon returning to the kitchen, he jumped up from the table and said, "Mom! Did you know that Gregor Mendel studied over thirty different kinds of peas?!".
Now I will admit, I looked around to see if my IPad was on the table, thinking he had looked up something weird to do with urine on You Tube or Google. But no- instead of an electronic device, a biography book laid quietly on the table, with post-it notes sticking out of the pages.
And suddenly, the kid who 15 minutes before was mumbling about homework magically turned into an animated history guide, talking nonstop for at least 10 minutes about not only Gregory Mendel, but other famous people in history.
From what I could make out of his excited babble, his grade is studying biographies of people who have changed history. Each student reads a book about their history-changer, but then the real fun begins. The kids dress up as their character and stand in the hallway like a statue, until someone presses the "button" on the floor in front of them. They then get to recite a paragraph about the person they studied, much like the animatronics you see in museums and Walt Disney World.
It sounds like the teachers did a great job mixing in the old and the new game changers, helping to keep it more interesting for the kids. The result is my 10-year old being able to recite facts about Marie Curie ( chemist and physicist), Samuel Adams ( law and lager maker), Sally Ride (female astronaut), Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth, Mark Zuckerburg (founder of Facebook), Albert Einstein, and yes, Gregor Mendel ( friar, grower of over 30 different kinds of peas, and the first geneticist).
So today's picture celebrates learning, and the teachers that inspire kids to do just that.
No comments:
Post a Comment