Recruiting, Writing and Soccer Gear

Thanks to my wife, Robyn, who is a school social worker in our district, I was invited to share our project at Joyner Elementary School yesterday.  I presented to the 5th grade students and their teachers as well as a few other staff members.  I wasn't real sure what to expect and basically just adapted a presentation I gave to our staff here at Mendenhall.   The kids were excited and had some great questions.  They were curious about how our schools differ from theirs.  So their plan is to come up with a list of questions that Robyn and I can take with us and work on answering as we visit Community Eleven.  We also provided their teachers with the idea of possibly having the students create an autobiographical poem that we could take with us to share and hopefully have CESC kids complete as well. In my classroom our students are working on creating an essay about a pivotal moment in their life to share with students in Tema who are preparing the same assignment.  I'm pretty excited about this for several reasons.  One, this is potentially our first real exchange between our students and I have a feeling that the topics the students have chosen will be radically different from each other.  I can't wait to see what comes out of these.   Finally, thanks to another connection provided by Robyn, we're communicating with Soccer.com's Passback program and are working on getting some gear to help Community Eleven build a soccer team.  This is kind of a side project from the original plan, but if we have the chance to connect through soccer (football) I'm all about it.  Mr. Atta also sees this as another opportunity for the kids in the region to find a positive outlet. Lots of stuff going on right now.  All kinds of ideas and possibilities.  I can't wait to see where all this takes us.