Hi! Sorry, Vivian, I've been kind of sick for a bit and lost track of various parts of my life including LiteracyWorkshop threads I needed to address... Anyway!
With 150 students, that's going to be very different from my school (22 students in the middle school program). We involve all our students in "MOCA" (our equivalent of student government - stands for Middle school Office Caring for All), but you may need to go to some sort of representative system. In my school's ninth grade, who participates in our Upper School Student Council, they rotate representatives throughout the fall and then hold elections in the winter term, so as to avoid the sort of hasty and uninformed decisions that can sometimes happen when elections are held very quickly when kids don't know each other well just yet. The kinds of things MOCA does is basically brainstorming possibilities for, planning, and carrying off: - social affairs (Halloween party, ice skating outing, etc.) - service projects (mostly around the school as we have mandatory off-site service) - special spirit kinds of days (e.g. "decade day") - other ideas the kids have. We will also go to them with specific issues where we'd like their input, like this year we wanted to know how our system of assigning tables was working out. In our experience, they respond really well to these kinds of questions. with care and thoughtfulness. That's a quick sketch of my school. We do consider MOCA a major part of our curriculum, for teaching social literacy (!) and group skills, and for coming together as a community. Please email me off-list if you have other questions. Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
