Monday, October 2, 2017

September 25th - 29th

Good morning and welcome to another edition of the YESS Institute at Scott Carpenter Blog. Last week, the 6th graders went off to Outdoor Ed for some unique experiences. That left the mentors behind and we put our time to good use! Take a look!

Monday was our first Mentor/Mentee Monday. On these days, the mentees work with Katrina on a special set of lessons that focus on social well-being. Mentors go to another space in the building for some targeted mentor training.

On Tuesday, we worked hard on our school work during Tutoring Tuesday. Most scholars brought homework from their core classes. Others practiced their reading skills on Achieve 3000.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent writing and acting mentoring skits. The students worked in their Kagan teams to write a skit about how the world's greatest mentor would respond to a conundrum. Here are some of the problems they were tasked with solving:
     1. A mentee who is disrespectful to everyone, including the mentor.
     2. A mentee who is sweet and kind, but can't sit still.
     3. A mentee who is clearly upset about something, but refuses to talk about it.
     4. A mentee who is so shy, they miss a lot of school.
These scenarios are common issues faced by mentors here and I was impressed with how they utilized mentoring best-practices in their skits. Many mentors are tempted to ask me for help whenever they run into an issue, so I challenged them to avoid using me as a resource in their work. They rose to the challenge by utilizing other mentors, school counselors, positive reinforcement, trust-building conversations, and even jokes to help their acting partner open up. All the scholars did an outstanding job with this assignment! Below, you'll see a piece of work related to the skit. Students were tasked with creating a Bubble Map that describes the qualities of an impactful mentor, then write about two qualities they would like to work on throughout the school year.
Friday, as usual, we practiced social skills via games. I'm constantly surprised by how many tiny disagreements arise while playing board games and this is an excellent opportunity for kids to practice conflict resolution in a low-risk environment.

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