The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind - Challenges in Our Community

We read The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and identified what a community was during our last library block.  Now it was time to identify challenges in our own community and create a plan for changes.

We began with a brainstorm of challenges in our community.  For some classes this was too big of a question and they did better with "challenges in our school."  I collected ideas on a padlet.

Screenshot of our brainstorming
Ideas fell into several categories and highlights included:

  • Challenges in our school 

    • Our playground is vandalized by older students
    • Students don't follow the rules
    • Students don't treat each other respectfully
    • Bullying

  • Challenges in our town

    • Litter (this came up over and over)
    • Some people don't have jobs or money
    • Car accidents/bad drivers/poor road conditions
    • Rail Trail - is this good for our town or not?

  • Challenges in my personal life (concerns that directly effect students or cause them to worry)

    • Money
    • Car accidents
    • Bullies

  • Challenges in the world 

    • Homelessness and hunger (some classes insisted that these situations did NOT exist in their town) although I assured them that they did and we talked about how these people are hopefully receiving aid from family, friends, and resources in town.
    • Immigration


Now it was time for students to choose a challenge they wanted to work on, spend some time thinking about possible solutions and plan how they would do something about it.  I had students self select teams (they had the option to work independently or in teams of 2 and 3).  They began developing their ideas.






Now that students had chosen their particular challenges of interest, the next step was to create a project to show their thinking.  To be continued...

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