Week # 15

How to fix homelessness?

Today we started with the 2 minute speeches on homelessness. We have started to see some visible differences from previous weeks. The kids are definitely gaining some confidence.

Although most of the speeches were 20-30 seconds less than 2 minutes, they put in a reasonable effort into it. Anaya stood out by mentioning some stats in her speech about the number of homeless people around the world and Australia.

I also encouraged them to look deeper into the causes of homelessness. To make sure they understand that it’s just not “bad decisions” that lead to people becoming homeless.

We all gave some feedback which included:

• Build some context on the subject by showing the scale of the issue at hand
• Pace yourself, don’t rush through your points
• Practice in the mirror with a timer
• Keep talking
• Glance over the entire audience every now and then

Power Tools!

We got the kids to work with a drill machine this week. First showing them how to drill holes in a piece of wood and then how to screw together 2 pieces of wood.

The kids then did it with some hand-holding to ensure safety but they seemed to have a good time doing it. Here are a couple of videos from the day.

What If The Sun Disappeared For One Month?

Next up, Amir showed the above video to the kids and then followed it up by some questions to test retention.

Kids seemed genuinely surprised by how much it would impact us if the sun disappeared. This one tied well with the gravity video from last week and now they could understand the idea of orbits better.

Amir gave them a question to think about, I think it definitely is an interesting thought experiment.

Is it possible for humans to survive if Earth became a rogue planet? If yes, how?

Misc

• Kids will start posting one blog entry each week. 250 words split between the learnings from the week + anything else they want to talk about.
• Quick intro the blog admin interface
• I asked the kids to write all words they could think of describing emotions in 5 minutes. We will continue with this exercise to expand vocabulary and better communicate emotions.