Persuasive Communications

We finished reading The Giver this week. During the course of reading this book, we have been exploring the question,"What makes an ideal society?" We had Socratic discussions on being born into a family as opposed to being assigned a family, choosing an occupation vs. being assigned an occupation, euthanasia and we even debated the ending of the story. What was interesting is that at the last discussion, a number of the students agreed on the ending of the story. They determined that it was hard to have a Socratic discussion when everybody agreed. The kids ran out of things to discuss. As a group, we decided that more progress was actually made when there was a disagreement. One of the kids noted,"That's kind of like in the book. Everybody had to agree with the rules of the society in order to avoid being released and it created the Sameness." Super!

As the kids discussed, a group acted as "recorders" and typed what they heard into our Cover It Live event. Cover It Live is a live blogging tool that is free to use.

Now the kids are taking their thoughts about an ideal society and writing a five-paragraph essay on what they think makes the ideal society. We will be completing these next week, just in time for spring break!