Ideas for Making the World a Better Place from a California Elementary School

Students from Lakewood, California Willow Elementary School Teachers Gabriela Mafi and Virginia Robledo Students Ages 8-12

One example from teachers who linked math to social concerns is from Gabriela Mafi and Virginia Robledo in Lakewood, California. In this project students identified issues of concern in their school and communities, engaged in various statistics and graphing activities around these issues, and read about and discussed how children can take action to make the world a better place.

Each student in Gabriela Mafi's sixth grade class and Virginia Robledo's third grade bilingual class met weekly with a buddy from the other class. The purpose of the buddy groups is to create collaborative and multicultural mentoring relationships between older and younger students. They began with simple "getting to know you" activities such as interviews, reading books together and just plain talking. One of the books the children read was "Kids who make a difference" by Phillip Hoose, about action children had taken to improve life in their communities.

One of the math activities they did was to gather data about important issues and make circle graphs to represent the data collected. Students were asked to brainstorm with their partners some social issue they did not understand, and to think of an important question to ask regarding this issue. Since it was close to Yellow Ribbon Week, a week devoted to ending school violence, many students chose to ask survey questions about violence. Some of the questions asked were: Why do people carry guns? How can we stop violence? Does violence kill Do you think there is too much violence on TV and the world? Why do we have wars? How can people prevent pollution?

After they collected data from classmates, each student met with his buddy(ies) to accumulate all of the data and begin the graph.

Gabriela and the students then used the Office'97 computer program to create great looking circle graphs.

The next step after surveying these questions and discussing them, was to come up with ideas for action. Children wrote up a plan for what they were going to do. Even though a lot of enthusiasm was generated around the survey and graphs, and the discussion deepened children¹s understanding of these issues, it was much more difficult for children to implement their "action plans." Even so, children did come up with realistic and practical goals like donating an hour of their time to a shelter, and to talk to friends and relatives in order to educate them about issues of violence, and environmental issues. Gabriela¹s Room 27 put out a class newspaper in which they reported on their buddy system, as well as world news, school news and classroom news (and gossip!). Future plans include Gabriela and Virginia Robledo¹s students publishing a shared newspaper, in which they will continue to share their ideas, discoveries and stories with the rest of the school.