Tuesday. Today I had to teach all day and JP had to work all day so once the kids were done with their work, they headed outside. And today was different than most days as ALL the neighborhood kids were outside today. I mean really playing together. At one point there were 9 kids in our backyard taking turns on the swing and playing with the chicks - who were free ranging in the backyard. It seemed that all the adults mutually agreed (separately) that today was the day that we'd throw caution to the wind and give up on social distancing. I mean its been 89 days since these kids have interacted! For the most part everyone in the neighborhood has been great at social distancing, keeping to their own property or when walking the dog or biking staying on one side of the street if there is someone else walking too. This last week Naomi and Juliet have been playing more with one particular neighborhood family and it has been hard to keep them far apart, but they were still more cautious than today. Today the kids were sharing bikes, go-carts, scooters, swings, sitting next to each other, sharing the swing together, etc. I'm not exactly sure how this all came to be but it just did! And the kids, well they had a ball. They enjoyed this new form of play. And seeing all the kids outside playing nicely together was great! Many parents were out watching too, more distantly than the kids. It was a weird sort of normalcy that we had all missed that made it feel ok.
Much of the afternoon was kids taking turns on the new swing we put up. At one or two points JP had to go and raise the swing as the more the kids swung the lower it seemed to get. Baba we'll have to tie the knot higher when you come over again! But the big kids pushed the little kids. And the little kids pushed the big kids. And everyone enjoyed the new swing! (And I didn't take any pictures of anything the kids did today....)
Today at work I continued to have conversations with my students about race and see how they were all feeling and doing with the current events going on in our country. One class I have is beginning to look at and create layouts for newspapers & magazines. So as an introductory assignment using basic google docs I was going to have the kids design a recipe of something that they cooked a lot during our remote learning & quarantine. A recipe is a good started assignment because they don't have to make up content, they just copy the recipe ingredients and instructions! Instead I decided to change it up to continue our conversation on race and have them think about what a recipe would look like for Equality, Justice or Unity. What might the ingredients be in a recipe like this and what might the directions or steps be to complete the recipe. Of course I run my new lesson ideas by my loving husband, who thinks like the worst student I could have in class and he asked me if I'd make an example to show the class. So I sat up last night doing just that. So below is my Recipe for Equality. As I was making this I came across this recipe for Anti-Racist Cake that I thought was also great. We must keep having this conversations, bringing this into the light so that it gets more comfortable to talk about, we can learn about each other's struggles and change can be made.
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