Taking Action - Room 23 Queenstown Primary

Last week I took a sneaky peek at the vision maps created by Room 23 and I couldn't wait to get in the class room and see what the children had been discussing. Their inquiry is 'How to beautify our school'. They have these maps outside their classroom and invite anyone to add their suggestions to them.

I'd been asked if I could come and facilitate a session to help the children plan some action projects. Awesome, time for me to dig into the fabulous tools in Section 3 of the kit. One of my favourites.

We started with a brief discussion of all the things they would like to see in school, much of this was to do with animals, somehow I think that having a sea lion at school may be a bit much, however there is no reason why they can't take some action to help better the quality of life of sea lions within NZ.

With all the different ideas written down we made a decision making matrix and figured out which were the most popular projects, rabbits & worm farms seemed pretty popular.

Time to split into groups and get out the Action Planners, page 406 of the kit. I love this page, it is so powerful. We write down our vision at the top, eg. 'We want to use worms to take care of some of our organic waste'. We then start to investigate what we need to do in order to reach this vision. This page has different sections with guiding questions to help the children out. What we end up with is a list of tasks and ideas that we can take action upon. So simple, so powerful and so much fun. Well done Enviroschools for developing such a powerful tool.

The session was over in a flash, the classroom was a buzz of excited productive conversation. They've still got a fair bit of work to do to achieve these visions but they are on the right track. Well done Room 23!