Article in The Boston Herald

Yesterday the Boston Herald wrote about One Hen's summer program and applauded our commitment to child philanthropy and our efforts, in collaboration with BELL, to teach children the value of socially responsible business.

Please follow the link to the article.

http://www.bostonherald.com/business/general/view.bg?articleid=1187237

One Hen Week 3 Reflection

This week was our first full week selling, and it has been going very well for all of the teams, in terms of how much money they are making and what they seem to be learning about entrepreneurship. It’s been very exciting for me to witness all of their success and frustrations that continue to add to their learning.

The scholars filling out what I’ve dubbed their “business paperwork” each day is one way that they continue to learn something about how a business operates. With this, I might add that the worksheets for each role does not seem to be useful for each business team (for staying organized), but the sheets are rather an important learning experience, as filling out such paperwork relates to basic business practices. For example, most of the business team members know how much money they have made, how many bracelets and beads they have left, etc., without having to refer to their business records. Perhaps the paperwork becomes more useful for organizational purposes when both key chains and bracelets are being made and sold…

Unlike what was originally planned, the scholars have not been selling at recess for multiple reasons. The biggest reason for which scholars have not been able to sell at recess is because of the way our recesses are organized; third graders go to the field, while fourth graders go to the playground, and there are no parents nor new teachers that are their. Essentially, they don’t have a market at recess. Obviously, this is not the case for dismissal, when many parents and visitors come.

When the scholars are selling at dismissal, I’ve noticed that the seating arrangements required for the scholars (for example, for fourth graders to sit near the back of the entrace) are also influencing the sales. On several occasions, those business teams near the entrance of the cafeteria have sold key chains because they’ve been able to reach the parents first, who themselves, will not move further into the cafeteria if they don’t have to. Trying to encourage parents to explore the entire cafeteria and check out other business teams can be somewhat difficult.

To several of my scholars’ credit, however, some of them have gotten around this by coming up with the idea of creating flyers to hand out to parents. I was very impressed with this, since this is not really a lesson that was emphasized when I discussed marketing with the scholars. In effect, the scholars ran into a problem (having to sit near the back) and came up with a solution (passing out flyers to encourage parents to come to the back) ! J

I decided to turn the slogan challenge into an assessment quiz instead of an oral game. I thought that this would give me a better idea of “who is where” regarding what we’ve learned and what I might need to re-emphasize before next week. For the third graders, I had teams work together to come up with answers, and I awarded the team with the highest number of correct responses. In total, the two classes answered about 12 questions each. I intentionally avoided the questions on marketing and advertising, since these were two concepts that I really did not go into depth with the scholars.

To conclude, I’m continuing to have difficulty deciding what the other scholars can do while the makers of each team produce key chains during production time. What usually happens is that all of the team members end up making key chains because they’re all so excited and don’t want to run out of key chains during selling time (and I think that they want to do something with their hands!). The only thing then that distinguishes a maker from the other roles is that they fill out the “maker’s” paperwork. I suppose this is okay? To solve this, I’ve had the remaining scholars create “new” posters or design potential flyers, or even practice their jingle. The scholars have yet to complain about this set up, though I’m running out of options.

Looking forward to next week!

One Hen in the Classroom Week 1 Day 4

On Day 4, BELL carried out its nation-wide "Summer Learning Day", which was a day about students identifying their specific goals and coming up with action plans to achieve those goals. Thus, I was unable to enact the lesson plan designed for that session of One Hen (the character profile cards, etc.) . However, I did use this day to tie in as much of the One Hen lessons we've discussed thus far as possible, in terms of goal-setting, obstacles, etc. This was especially useful as the scholars identified their own goals they wanted to achieve this summer and comparing them to the type of goals that Kojo set for himself. In our discussion of the obstacles that Kojo faced in trying to establish his own business, I decided to introduce the term "classism" to the scholars in describing why the banker refused to give Kojo a loan. Though I thought that this was important for scholars to know, given many of their own socioeconomic conditions, I didn't really know how scholars would respond to it. Surprisingly, however, several of them already knew what that term meant, and they compared it to the term "racism."As an educator with a social justice-orientated pedagogy, I was very excited at this. It was also exciting how easily the scholars seemed able to identify the goals and obstacles of Kojo, which highlighted that they really had comprehended a lot of the story. On Monday, I still plan to review the major themes and events of the book before we jump into establishing our own business teams.

One Hen in the Classroom Week 1 Day 3

On Wednesday, the class welcomed a very special guest: the author of One Hen! The kids seemed to really enjoy having her as evidenced by the many questions they had for her regarding her authorship as well as general questions about what life is like in Ghana. Though I was a bit hesitant to do so initially, I am actually glad I used the prize of the One Hen bracelet and bookmark to "influence" how the scholars would behave. I'm still trying to come up with a systematized way of using the coveted :-) One Hen prizes to influence their behavior and participation during class. So far, I've just rewarded them to two students after each class; students whose behavior was very participatory, but controlled, and also who easily followed directions for that day. It's worked reasonably well thus far, actually. After Ms. Milway left,we decided to review our key lessons and key One Hen words. We also finished the second half of the georgina video, and as with the first day, they orally identified/discussed similarities and differences with their lives and the lives of children in Ghana. Speaking of the video, the scholars really appreciated having the kente and adinkra cloths to physically observe. I also passed this around the class as scholar watched the video. I'm thinking that as we continue to practice our fufu song, it might be a good idea to get a few pictures of the food so that they can actually visualize what we're singing about.

One Hen in the Classroom Week 1 Day 2

Again, another great day! I had several parents come to me as scholars were signing out expressing how excited their child seemed to be about One Hen. I think we’re off to a great start, definitely! ;-)

With that said, I’m realizing more and more that given the time it takes to draw connections from the story with the students’ lives and discuss “key words”, it is taking me considerably longer to get through the book than what the lesson plan allots. Today, we got up to page 13, and that was even a bit more rushed than I would have liked. However, the students certainly seem to be enjoying the story and are doing great making predictions and summarizing! Related to the read-aloud activity, I did not use the “work hard” worksheet or the drumming again because of time.

The students especially enjoyed the Georgina Williams video. I stopped occasionally to discuss the similarities that students identified with the children in the video (and with other information we have discussed; for example, what day must Uncle Kwame must have been born and what season must it be given how it is raining?). They seemed to particularly engaged with this DVD, and are definitely looking forward to finishing it, based on their reactions when it was time to cut it off.

In place of the Day Name Dance, I worked with the scholars on the fufu song (from yesterday), and though they seemed a bit shy today, I plan to practice it for a short while (or if we have any down time) each day. I’m sure they’ll grow to enjoy it J .

One Hen in the classroom Week 1 Day 1

Day 1
Overall, I thought the lesson went great. The scholars seemed to be engaged with the story and the other activities. They especially seemed to enjoy learning that in Ghana children are named according to the day of the week they are born on and learning what their names would be if they had been born in Ghana :-).

When the scholars first entered, I had South African music playing instead of the music from the website (which is what I would have preferred.) However, there was no Internet access. Considering that the scholars did enjoy the music, it might be helpful to have the One Hen website music on a separate CD, so that the Internet connection won’t be an issue. I tied in the African music with the fact that we are learning about a country in Africa. I also discussed with the students why they thought it was important to learn about Africa in general, asking questions such as; why do you think we want to know about people all the way across the world? Why would this be helpful to us here in America?. I thought that this was also something to emphasize from the beginning with the scholars.

I was not able to complete all of the interactive read-aloud today because it was important for me to take 10 minutes at the beginning to explain the classroom expectations and other administrative things) at the beginning. This might be something to think about for future sessions. (We made it to page 7 in both classes).
I opted not to do the drumming (when scholars identified a problem and solution) during the read-aloud because I was convinced it could be a distraction. What I did do, however, was create a “One Hen Key Words” list with words that seemed a little difficult to understand. When we came across a word that students didn’t understand during the story, I added the word to the list and we discussed it a little bit (thinking about how it was used in the sentence, etc.) until we came up with the definition. I thought that such a list would be especially helpful considering that this is a similar technique used by the BELL literacy teachers.

Also, for the read-aloud part of the activity, I distributed one-hen books to partner groups so that they could read along with me. I thought that this was very effective because it kept the students engaged while I read, and they were also able to physically identify the words as we read them.
Finally, I did not get to do the “crazy memorization” or the fufu dance and song. However, I do plan to begin tomorrow’s lesson with the dance and song as an interactive starter.