Student work and stories from classrooms participating in "The Eleanor Rigby Project" is starting to roll in- classes from Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi and Illinois. My students have begun to email the students from Mississippi and next week they will
have a bulletin board discussion about the "criminalization of the homeless".

Today I posted the student work from Inverness, Mississippi, a poor rural area populated predominantly by minorities (the response of my students to this statement was "If they are the majority, then why are they called minorities?). The teacher sent poetry and a few pictures. I can't tell you how it warmed my heart to see those kids working on mind maps and affinity diagrams, something they had never done before. After exchanging emails, the students from Mississippi are wondering what "tobogganing" is and my students are wondering what on earth, "catfish crops" are. One student received an email telling them that there is a "cotton gin" right smack in the middle of their town. My students had no clue what that was either. Discussion, discussion, discussion! The teacher from Inverness said
he gave his students clues and "soon had them discovering the world of tobogganing".

It snowed today in Calgary and my kids want me to take digital pictures of them making "snow angels" for their friends in the balmy south! Both sets of students are scurrying off to a temperature converter tool (found on the Internet) so they can convert Celsius to Fahrenheit or vice versa, so they know exactly how cold it is in Calgary or how hot it gets in Inverness in August. We were told that the students from Mississippi were surprised to learn that French was mostly spoken only in the province of Quebec and commented that it will be fun and challenging for them to learn why this is so.
Student interest is at an all time high! Their work went live today on the Eleanor Rigby web site. Here is the URL :

http://www.masters.ab.ca/bdyck/Homeless/Studentwork/Inverness/index.html

To top this off, I received an email from a 6th grade teacher who teaches 6th grade in Chelsea, Michigan (about an hour west of Detroit) who explained how she implemented The Eleanor Rigby Project with her students. I couldn't believe how she had taken this project and flown with it. Here is what they did:

- We spent one class period creating the affinity charts and discussing the results. The next day we created mind maps. Students were totally invested in both of these activities.

- Students took the Homeless Survey home over the weekend, and the following Tuesday we discussed the results, THEN we read the top 10 myths, from the Ann Arbor Shelter Association (linked from the Eleanor Rigby site).

-We read, discussed, and outlined the America's Homeless Children article.

- I shared statistics on rent payments in this area, and as a class we did the math on the income needed to provide for a family.

- We discussed the many and varied causes of homelessness, from manufacturing jobs going overseas to mental problems to other
causes.

- I shared the personal experience of my own family helping a Navajo family whose house had burned, and information from books about the homeless borrowed from the local libraries.

- I read selections from "Monkey Island" by Paula Fox.

- Students created and shared "I Am" poems, with piano music as background.

- I had sent home a note about the Homeless Unit, as well as an opportunity to serve a meal at Alpha House, an interfaith-based shelter for homeless families in Ann Arbor. On Tuesday, December 2, sixteen students with their parents and siblings provided a potluck
dinner for the guests at the shelter. After dinner the students read to young guests and played in the "game room."

- More than one family asked when we could do this again. Thank you for telling us about the Eleanor Rigby Project. I will do it again!

Funny how yesterday I felt somewhat wired and tired, because today I am definitely "wired and inspired"!