This week in the 1st grade classroom, we continued our Reforming the Heart unit. Students started to think about how kids can bring positive change to the world too. After a pep talk from Kid President, they jumped onto FreeRice.com, a program by the UN World Food Programme that donates the equivalent of 10 grains of rice for every trivia question answered correctly. The class worked hard to donate 9440 grains of rice from the trivia questions they answered. We also had a lot of fun with the GIANT addition problem where we added together all of the grains of rice that each student earned.

In the afternoon, the students started to brainstorm about how they could make positive changes in the world by adding their ideas to three giant circle maps around the room. They reflected on the "People and Things we Care About," "Ideas of How to Make the World a Better Place," and "Forms of Communication." 

Next week, students will pull from this data to design an outreach project to better the world. There was already some buzz on Friday about the possibility of making a commercial to teach their homeroom classmates about FreeRice.com as well as some fun ideas to help animals at the animal shelter, so I can't wait to see the change their little hearts can make!