Last week, we learned about preferences. We talked about what preferences are, and whether we can have the same or different preferences. We started our discussion on preferences with an activity called Human Bar Graphs, where I read different scenarios and students had to show whether they always, sometimes, or never like that activity. Through the activity, we were able to see that we had many different preferences about different things in our classroom.
For the rest of the lesson, we talked about two students who were working on a science assignment. For the assignment, they had to hold a worm and examine its different parts. Tiana was excited to hold the worm, but Brandon was disgusted. Tiana was able to use her feeling clues (face, body and situation) to see that Brandon wasn't feeling the same way she was, so she asked questions to figure out how he was feeling. Once she knew he didn't want to hold the worm, she thought of things she could say or do to help him in this situation.
Students took turns sharing with their partners what they thought Tiana should do to help. Ultimately, Tiana ended up telling Brandon it was okay that he didn't want to touch the worm, and she offered to hold it for him so he could look. We talked about how Tiana used the steps of empathy to figure out how Brandon felt, and because she had empathy she was able to help him.
We ended the lesson with another round of Bar Graphs, this time with students noticing whether they and their partners had similar or different preferences. We practiced having empathy by telling our partners "it is okay to have different preferences" whey they didn't have the same answer.
