Teacher's With Wild Ideas

I had a very entertaining High School Biology teacher. He began our AP Bio class Senior year by throwing sheep hearts across the room to students who answered some random bio related trivia questions correctly.  Of course, we didn't realize this was the prize until the first correct response was uttered.  I remember with vivid sensation the excitement I held daily walking to his class.

Now that I'm a teacher, I get an equal rush out of creating wild rollercoaster moments with my students. This is easy to do when I direct science club each week. Social studies often lends itself to these experiences too. Like measuring out the dimensions of Christopher Columbus' ships and drawing them in chalk on the pavement then assigning "jobs" on deck and setting sail for a class period while imagining months confined to such a vessel in unknown waters with unknown dangers lurking ahead.

Reading instantly takes us to new places, but writing can be approached so dryly as to leave students begging to write as few sentences as possible in their next paragraph. The word "paragraph" alone can elicit sighs and moans.

Today, I put a bunch of "parts" cut-out from various sources and put them on the board. I said to my class, "I need a new character for a story. Can you help me make one?" We picked head shapes (there were a few animals and inanimate objects in the mix), eyes, hair, horns, ears, headwear, bodies (again animals and inanimate objects were present) and on and on... pretty soon we came up with a character that would take a lot of sentences to describe thoroughly. "It" had more than several interesting attributes that could help or hinder it on a long adventure. I then handed over the concept to them. They pondered silently (a rare moment of absolute hear-a-pin-drop silence in a 5th grade classroom) and then a blank piece of paper with a set of cut-outs along with some 'blanks' for them to make their own ideas. Of course, a couple of the artistic types were stifled by cut-paste characters and set right to drawing away as their minds would take them, but my less than skilled technicians loved it. Cut, paste, re-arrange, research, draw in a few bits here and 9 characters entered our rooms. Not all had names, but  many were already named by the time their figures were formed. It was easy for the kids then to start writing away the answers to the Main Character Questionairre's in the YWP Workbook. 

They all wanted to make another. I gave no reaction and sent them on to their Karate class. Tomorrow.... supporting characters and VILLIANS!! *bwahahaha*