Prompt #3: Shor

Shor argues that participation leads to active members of society. Assessments do not often include many elements of participation. However, in Mrs. Brown’s first grade classroom, an interesting way to challenge this notion was found. One of my first visits occurred on the Friday before April vacation. This also happened to be the 100th day of school. The students all throughout the school were engaged in celebration activities of the one hundredth day.

In my classroom, they were making necklaces out of Froot Loops. The teacher put an example on the board. They started with a large piece of construction paper and picked out, as a class, five different colors. They picked red first, On the paper they each drew two red circles, horizontally next to each other. They then picked blue, and underneath the red, drew two blue circles. The next color was green, then purple, then yellow, the process was repeated. Once the circles were drawn, the students had to fill them in with 10 of that color froot loops. When the circles were filled, they need to cut string to make the necklaces. They were given a certain length to fit with the teachers necklace. They then had to string the necklaces by putting ten froot loops at a time to create a pattern. This was interesting to me because it brought about ideas of complex mathematics in a hands-on way. The closer the students’ necklace looked to the teachers, the better ‘grade’ they got on it. They all participated to make this activity work. This assessment was a type that was easy to understand for students in all linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characteristics and make it easy to participate. This classroom has very different ethnicities. Because the teacher led by example, it was easy for the students to follow. The great thing about it was that even though they all should have been made the same way, there were differences. It was interesting to see this because that means that there was some miscommunication somewhere that someone did not understand the directions. But, since they all were able to participate, they all got a feel and were able to work through the “curious nature” Shor speaks of. This will make students of all ethnicities, according to Shor, productive members of society.