Teaching about Culture

I have started off the year teaching about culture. I found this marvelous unit, Building Bridges, on the Peace Corps website. This is an awesome site that has all kinds of lessons for all grade levels. If you want to teach your students about different cultures, this is the place to look. While I was looking around the site I found that I could ask for a volunteer to correspond with for my class. We got paired with a wonderful young man who is working with special needs young people in Jordan. My class will be emailing him several times a week and he will be sharing information about the Jordanian people with us. What a wonderful way to learn about another culture! My class is very excited about being able to correspond with this volunteer and learn about another culture. We are making a large map of Jordan to hang outside our room where we will post everything that we learn about the country and it's people. This is the address of the website. I am hoping that I have done this right so that it links right to the site. If not, I am also posting this on my Places to Visit where I know you can just click and it will take you there. http://www.peacecorps.gov/wws/publications/bridges/

Welcome to My Blog

Hi! I am starting this blog to keep a record of things I do while teaching sixth grade. I am especially interested in the movement of the Common Core State Standards. I am really passionate about creating an education for our students that prepares them for the global world in which they will live. We can no longer do what we have been doing for the past 50 years. It isn't working and we are cheating our students out of a chance to compete with those from other nations.
When my son, who went to a private boarding school for high school, entered Washington University in St. Louis, he expected to be top of the class since he was at his high school. However, he found, that even with the best education money could buy, he was not as well prepared as those students who came from foreign countries. He had to work very hard to catch up to where they were. Now, he could and did, but why aren't our students at the same level of education when they enter college? Why is our educational system continuing to teach material that does not prepare our students for the world in which they live? As educators, we need to push for changes that will make the system a better place for the students. If we back away because it is new or we like doing things the way we have always done it, then we no longer belong in education. We need to work together to make education in the United States a priority so that future generations will be able to be successful in our global world!