First Club Meeting!

Going into my leadership meeting today I was very excited to bond and get to know some of the kids that I'd be working with.  They started coming in as soon as school let out, but it saddened me that the group only amounted to three students after giving a grace period of three/ five minutes.  I had already accepted that I'd be starting with a small number of seven students, and that as the semester continued, I'd have to recruit more students for the group to progress.  To see that only three of the seven showed for the first meeting was a little discouraging.  I'm not sure why the other four students decided not to show today.  Nonetheless, we had a good time together.

We started with the same tissue game that I used for our meeting icebreaker!  The kids thought the twist to the island and having to share about themselves was funny.  They enjoyed telling the group more about themselves. None of my students knew each other before this first meeting, which was good.  Today there was one seventh grade African American male, a sixth grade female (I believe she was Mexican), and another six grade female who was Caucasian.  So, the group was diverse as far as race and by some of the activities they shared that they were involved in.

Following this activity we took a break, ate pizza, and at that time we just talked and they asked a few questions about some of the things we'd be doing in the club.  Then we went on to answer questions about leaders and leadership. When asked one of the questions,  "Who do you view as a leader?", it stuck out that they recognized historic leaders.  People mentioned were Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and although not historic, Barack Obama.  Behind each leader, the students were able to give legit reasoning as to why these people were leaders and how they've affected what is happening today.

To discuss qualities of a  "leader", we started making a poster.  The poster is of a crowd of pretend people, with one person in the middle who is considered to be "different" than everyone else.  In this person, I had students identity him/ her as the leader as asked them what qualities should this person have.  As they listed qualities I wrote them on the board and we discussed the significance of each of the qualities.  Next time, we will make puzzle pieces to fill in the leader with those qualities they listed (if that makes sense). So, the leader's body will be made out of puzzle pieces.  Each of those pieces will have a leadership quality.  And the leader is the pretend person on the board who is sticking out from everyone else in the crowd.

To end, I left them with questions to think about for the next meeting:

What do you think would be a good group name?

What do you hope to gain from being a part of this leadership club?

To debrief, I think the ideas I had to begin expressing leadership to the students were all great, but because the group was not was large and because all of my students were not outspoken, there was not a large range of ideas and it was hard for the activities to be engaging.  There was one female who loved talking, she shared a lot regarding her ideas and her personal stories.  I was surprised to have a student this open on the first day. The others didn't have a problem talking if they were called on, but they were not adamant about being the first to share.

-I would write more, but I feel like this post is already too long.  If you guys have any questions, ideas, anything.....I'd love for you to post.  Thanks-