Click Clack Mooooo!

Today, the first day back to school since the strike, the students reacted much more maturely than I expected. A few students seemed frustrated by telling my MT and I that they wanted to learn and were sad that they couldn't be in school to learn. To explain the strike further, we read Click Clack Moo during read aloud. In this book, the farm animals were going on strike because they wanted electric blankets from the farmer, who refused to give in. My MT took this time to explain what a strike is, and why the teachers were fighting. In my opinion, she did a fantastic job spinning the strike and the story, and turning into a lesson on compromising. She explained that sometimes, when two people or groups of people want different things, in order to come to an agreement, they need to compromise. The students were to think of a time that they didn't think they were being treated fairly, and had to compromise with someone to reach an agreement. It is important that the students understood the reason for the strike and that sometimes in order to come to an agreement you need to compromise. I understand that the students probably heard about the strike through their parents/families, the media, and by word of mouth. I understand that students seemed to grasp the fact that the teachers were not abandoning them, and that they were really fighting for the better of the students. Through this story and read aloud time, the students were able to make connections to the story by sharing a time when they had to compromise with someone. They wrote about what the compromise was, why they were fighting for it, and how they resolved it in the end. I think that this is a case of the students making sense of what they know/heard about the strike, and forming their own thoughts and connections to both the real world strike, and the book, Click Clack Moo.