Kids and Pop Culture

It's been a week with little opportunity for me to teach up until today. Between being a regular ole keeper for a few days and coming down with a bad case of food poisoning it was nice to get back on my feet and actually get to teach. First thing I always notice about kids and the weekend is that their parents have very little control over them and your ear drums literally start to ring. I was rather inspired by the reading for this week and thought that I would take the opportunity to infuse some fun pop culture references into my narratives. I always have to survey the room and get a look at the general age level before I can plow head first into teaching because it is so easy to either oversimplify or to make it far too difficult for kids to understand.

I took the opportunity with a large group of teenagers to try out a new idea I'd been working on which is to simply liken animals to being Olympic athletes. Basically, I tell them about the animal and then what sport they would best fit into. For example, Manatees even weighing thousands of pounds only have about a 2 - 4% body fat percentage and are strictly herbivores. For us humans, that's pretty much the percentage you would see on a body builder or an elite Olympic athlete. In honor of the winter Olympics I decided they'd be pretty awesome curlers because they are slow, but gentle and always on point. I got some good laughs out of the group and I could tell they were following what I was saying. It made it very easy for me to tie in conservation messages because just like athletes get injured sometimes so do animals. There are so many ways to tie in different references that can connect students to whatever subject you are teaching. It is my goal to make a huge list of ideas and have them kind of tucked away so that I can use them as needed to hopefully more effectively teach in the future.