I've been a bad, bad blogger

It's been a l-o-n-g week!  I'm the ESL Chairperson on my campus and while I've had a sprinkling of ESL trainings in my teaching career - I have never been a chairperson.  The previous chairperson left in mid-year, so there is no one to ask questions of.  It's a lot of chicken running-around-with-her-head-cut-off type behavior on my part.  There are a lot of deadlines, everyone assumed I knew about and yet I had not one clue about them!  Well, I'm taking care of business on that front.

I've been a bad, bad blogger b/c my camera with new batteries sat in my purse all week!  Yeah, that was a smart move on my part.  We did a great activity in Social Studies this week and I'm kicking myself right now.  We were discussing Renewable and Nonrenewable resources.  My students did not understand the concept of nonrenewable resources, so we played a game that involved....popcorn!

I popped 3 bags of popcorn and put them inside a grocery bag marked TEXAS.  Each table got a lunchsized paper bag, I stapled a notecard on each one that had a name of a city on it and an amount.  For example, San Antonio had 1/2 a bag and Red Oak had 1/2 a cup.  I explained that my bag was full of nonrenewable resources and they would get as many resources as their city needed. Why would one city need more?  They got that if they had more people they would use more resources.  Then, one student asked, what if my city runs out of resources?  I said, that's a good question, what do you think you should do?  Someone says, "well I'd move to another table with more popcorn natural resources."

ah-ha moment!

So, we ate popcorn and when Red Oak ran out, they couldn't wait to move to San Antonio's table and eat all of theirs!  Of course, San Antonio wasn't happy about sharing.  I think everyone grasps the concept now.

By the way, my class did not win the PTA drive, but we did come in 2nd and my class got free snacks from the snack cart so they were not too disappointed.