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...