Riddle Me This

I am continuously amazed with how creative some of my students are. If given enough time, they are able to come up with truly amazing ideas and can really think outside of the box. One such example came up in class today.

For my second graders I designed an activity where they work on their negociation and logic skills. The whole class works together as one team to figure out 10-12 riddles. They have the entire period and are allowed to talk as much as they want, as long as it is in English. They are not allowed to speak in Polish or any other language. (I had to add the second part of this rule because in another class students were speaking in German and French!) They were allowed to guess as many times as they needed to in order to figure out the correct answer. The whole class would get the same grade on this assignment. I started by writing a "6" on the board, which is the highest grade that can be awarded. For every time I hear words that were not English, I marked down part of a grade, so to "5+" to "5" to "5-". . . .

Listening and watching the students work on these riddles was quite fun for me. I could really see the gears in some of their brains working. It also was neat to see who emerged as a leader of discussion in the group and who just sat back and thought. As in any group activity, some students got very frustrated, others were active the whole time, and some didn't do much of anything. For today I was okay with this.

About eight riddles and 35 minutes into class, one student says to another, "If we had just sat here in silence for 45 minutes we all would have gotten a 6 but because we talked we are going to get a 5. This doesn't seem like a very fair deal to me." I had to bite my tongue so that I wouldn't start laughing. I do not think I would have let them sit in silence for 45 minutes, just so they could get a 6. Though maybe if they could actually do this, they would deserve it. I will have to ponder this for the next time.

Blessings,
Collene