Hi Everyone,
I wanted to give you the first of five links to an award-winning CBC Documentary called "Children Full of Life" posted in 8 minute parts on Youtube. It is a look into a grade 4 classroom in Japan over the course of a year as kids learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates. It doesn't avoid the hard parts of teaching (like some of our classes gloss over!) and incidents of bullying, the death of a parent, and other very real-life experiences are shown as they happen. I would really encourage everyone to take a look...it is inspiring in real ways.
Alysson
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Hey Alysson,
Thanks for posting this series on the blog. This truly shows the importance of building care in the classroom. Not only are these students attending class, they all care for one another. To me, this is an astonishing feat considering the lack of care seen throughout the world as seen in the millions of starving children. In addition, Toshiro Kanamori teaches some of his students how to be critically aware of their location in the classroom. Essentially, when he tries to take away the class’s rafting trip as a means for punishing a few students, the innocent students judge his punishment as being unfair and then they thoroughly argue for a more fitting punishment. Clearly Toshiro has constructed his classroom to resemble a social democracy and his students have taken this constructivist opportunity to work together and plan some of the activities for the semester. In the end, this video demonstrates the strength of a class which is not focused on grades but is instead focused on working together and helping one another.
Inspiring series!
Thanks,
Dallas.
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