We started the week on the roof. When my class
B.C. Crisis Centre. This has been such a good experience teaching the class and me how to be more mindful and giving strategies for dealing with stress. This week took some deep breathing and using STOP (stop, take a breath, observe, and proceed). In this session we learned not to jump back and forth between what we think is bad and good but try to notice what is happening and realizing what we might think is bad could actually be good etc. Just observe...
Compassionate Eye came and brought her brother, Robert, the founder. That was so exciting and I know the kids treasured their kind words. Here is a little bit of the video clip. And Sharon from Room to Read was there as well and gave us a copy of Room to Read founder's children's book, Zak the Yak, the that we have now placed in our school library. Here is a bit of the clip of Sharon's speech to the class. The kids had a lot of fun planning and executing lemonade and freezie and bake sales. Both these ladies had earlier given presentations about their organizations and taught the kids some great strategies for fundraising that I know they will continue to use in the future. I am also going to put a copy of Julia's review on the pages section of this blog... So in addition to fundraising of our Me to We Club for Free the Children, this class raised just over 1800 dollars for the Vancouver Food Bank, the Downtown East Neighbourhood House, the Union Gospel Mission, the Nepal Library Foundation, Compassionate Eye, and Room to Read. The lesson I learned from this was to try to put as much responsibility in the hands of the children as possible. Then the ownership is theirs not mine.
I have to say they were kind of wonderful. We went from wolves to rap musicians to the Philippines
a park named after him in Baguia, a city he planned in the Philippines? On Monday we will share them with other classes in the school.
So it's a weekend that will include writing certificates and making up humorous awards for each person in the class and making final decisions on more serious awards. I also will work on a final slideshow for the school's final assembly Thursday. But it was a great week even if I didn't get the final science and French lessons in... Next week is really about cementing in those final memories for the kids and for me!