At work, the first graders spent much of their day engaged in a leprechaun hunt. Little green footprints trailed from the fish pond garden up to one of the 1st grade classroom doors and out through another. Happy, excited pairs of shamrock-hatted little people roamed throughout the school in search of clues that the leprechaun had left. The were able to use critical thinking skills to help them solve the simple riddle in each clue. At the end of the day, there was a fat pot of gold unearthed from the sand of the playground, its yawning mouth overflowing with shiny gold coins.
Activities like this help kids learn in a way that is meaningful to them. When a learning experience is meaningful, it is memorable, and can lead to higher level thinking. This is the goal of education: not simply to produce people who can score well on tests, but people who think and use this ability to solve problems. Only when we efficiently prepare students for life in the world are we truly achieving what it is we set out to do at the beginning of each new school year.