February 12th - 16th

This week absolutely flew! It felt like I blinked twice and it was Friday! Anyway, I was out on Monday, but the mentors and mentees continued with their regularly scheduled programming. On Tuesday, we tutored. Now that conferences are over, the students are re-energized and ready to work on their assignments.

We explored Hot Buttons (the things/situations that cause intense, uncomfortable emotions) on Wednesday and Thursday. When sharing stories of our Hot Buttons, students shared stories about siblings, classmates, and even teachers that pressed their buttons. Thursday, we talked a little about how to counteract those strong emotions by activating our Cool Buttons. Because this lesson was heavy with worksheets, we implemented many fun Kagan structures to break it up. This is a topic we'll continue this week by creating a tool for the scholars to use when their buttons get pushed.

Due to the incident in Florida last week, we spoke as a class about how everyone was feeling. Many students expressed fear about coming to school, so we discussed how fear is generally irrational. It feels real (and that's OK) but we have a safe school community so we need to think logically to combat our fears. It was refreshing to give the scholars space to open up about this issue and focus on the loving community we work so hard to maintain.

On Friday, our 6th grade scholars had the opportunity to participate in Junior Achievement, a financial literacy program. Because so many students were out (and we temporarily adopted some stray 7th and 8th graders) we took it easy and watched a movie.