Bringing world issues to the school

 Her team

The Hunter

I've been griping a lot about Sindhu's school lately. Fifth grade just didn't seem to be challenging enough and after checking some of the sample exam questions from California's STAR testing, I was even more worried.  But yesterday was one of those days that reinforced that the school deserves more credit than I give it.  Next fall, Sindhu will no longer be a primary student, she will be entering middle school, I know, I can't  believe it myself. As part of the 5th grade curriculum, they have an end of the year exhibition which requires one month of preparation time and it's a very important milestone in 5th grade. Multiple teams  were formed each with a different topic. Sindhu's team was focused on endangered animals. They prepared poster, flyers, workbooks, a PPT, they had a field trip to the zoo where they interviewed one of the zoo keepers and they sold some book marks and stickers to raise money to adopt an  endangered animal. As I walked through the various exhibitions,  the natural leaders and speakers among the children stood out but each child did their part in the presentation.  One boy who presented an incredible amount of detail asked me to rate their exhibition and I rated it 9.5 out 10 which I thought was pretty good but he asked me what they could do to improve their score, he caught me off guard, fortunately he was diverted as I was racking my brain to come up with something. One of the key takeaways for each presentation was what the children could do to reverse the problems in the world. Some of the other themes were poverty, terrorism, pollution, child labour, deforestation, and depletion of natural resources. After the gallery walk, each group presented a short skit on their topic. They had varied themes, Sindhu's group did a musical and Sindhu played a hunter that killed an endangered animal and she totally enjoyed her role. I particularly liked the terrorism skit which had a poverty stricken boy who was approached by  2 terrorists to kill someone and in return they gave him money which he accepted, it was impressive how in a few minutes they described one form of  recruitment into terrorist groups. All the skits were equally impressive.