Elementary/High School Mentoring - Dance Party
On Tuesday February 22, 2011, twelve sleepy eyed Roxhill Elementary students rolled out of bed to come to a Learning Party at the local high school. There to greet them were 12 equally sleepy high school students. But wait - it didn't look like your normal Winter Break learning activities - no books - but balloons, party streamers and music greated students who attended. After some introductory party games, students worked together to create a dance party project.
This party was sponsored by the local YMCA, SMARTGirls and Adobe Youth Voices. Students were able to use music editing software to create their own songs to include in their projects. Each "little kid" got to choose a "big kid" to mentor for this project. Some of the elementary students are enrolled in an after school science club which has been creating Scratch projects on motion and water conservation. After the project, students ate lunch together and watched the projects each group had made. Some of the elementary and high school students had never used Scratch before, and students went away excited about the possibilities of Scratch. See more of the projects at our Gallery http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/98852
I have been working on mentorship projects where students from the high school go to the elementary school once a week either as part of class-mentoring-class projects (physics mentors second graders in science) or as part of after school projects. There are now over 100 high school students mentoring elementary students in our feeder school system. This allows elementary students to build bonds to the high school and to science through sharing exciting hands on learning activities.
There's so much that I love about this story -- making a special party atmosphere, creating music for the dance party projects, (as Michelle mentioned) personalizing the dancers with photos, having time at the end to have lunch and share work.
Thanks so much for sharing -- it's given me ideas for our next workshop! :)
This reminds me of the WiSE Dance Party that ScratchEd hosted in December. There was quite a similar mentoring situation as well, with "older" MIT undergraduates mentoring "younger" high school girls, although there were members of both groups that were new to Scratch.
Thank you for sharing the projects. I especially like that the students personalized the projects with their photos.
Wow! I love this idea, thanks so much for sharing!