my friend aaron is doing some awesome things w/ his 1st graders. Aaron's bringing activist Yuri Kochiyama to speak to his 1st graders this week! I'm so excited b/c I get to go too! tight. anyway, i will blog about that once it happens. B/c i work with HS students i miss out on many of the darling things little ones do/ say. To prep his students for Yuri, Aaron paired the kids and had them write 2-3 questions they have for her. Tonight we looked through the questions in preparation for tomorrow's class. There were the usual ones: What is your favorite color? Some good questions: How is in your community? Why do you help people? How did you help kids get street lights? And then some laugh out loud questions: How did you save the day? What is your favorite dinosaur? I LOVE the dinosaur question!

On another note, Aaron has been doing a lot of teaching about "community" w/ his kids. He gave examples of what different communities look like, one example was his mixed race heritage (JA, Irish, etc etc). All the students of color remained quiet while the white kids in his class got excited and claimed "I'm Irish and French" "I'm 100% European. That is my community. " AND "The Pilgrims are my community"". Man, how do you problemitize and explain all that to 1st graders?