Learn and Serve 11/12

I was supposed to have Learn and Serve yesterday but due to the holiday I made up my hours this afternoon. The students are working on a non-fiction children's book project. The steps of this project are researching a non-fiction topic in the library, generating questions to answer in their book, writing and illustrating a 10-12 pages children's book (with only about 2-3 sentences on each page), creating a bibliography, and publishing their book into a REAL "hard copy". It was a good thing I came into class this afternoon because Mrs. Burkett had her hands full. The students were extra noisy today. Mrs. Burkett tried to calm them down. She is very understanding because she has a son in 7th grade. She said it's especially hard for this class to stay focused because it has been about 4 hours since they had lunch, their only break of the day. Not only are they rowdy for this reason, they are also looking forward to the end of the day. Although the students were really talkative today, they are friendly and respectful toward me. Mrs. Burkett explained what the students would be doing in the library for the rest of class. After she explained it thoroughly, she called on random students to repeat to everyone what she had just instructed them to do. The students were able to repeat the directions but once we moved to the library it was a different story. Basically, chaos broke out. The students were even louder than they had been in the classroom. Luckily, there was no other students in the library so we were not disturbing anyone else. Mrs. Burkett split up the "talkers" and put all of the quiet and good independent workers at one table in the back. These students had less supervision. The students who caused a bigger disruption were at a few tables with us. There were also two librarians there to help out. The students were everywhere! At one point I had to go out into the hall and call one boy into the library because he had taken the pass and was just goofing off. I was shocked, he listened to me. He continued to not do much of anything for the rest of the class no matter who tried to discipline or help him. Mrs. Burkett told me that a different boy in class went to the Alternative School last year because he said he wanted to "blow up the school." He was joking, but it was nothing to joke about and he was punished. He seems like a dedicated student, I was surprised when I found out he had been a "trouble maker." Hopefully the students have a while to work on this project because so far it is taking them a long time to finish simple tasks. I hope to see major progress by the time I see them again next week!