Bead For Life: Lesson 1

We had a very successful week with our Bead For Life lessons.  I taught the lessons to my small group of students, and we strategized together about what our lesson next week should look like.  These lessons have lead to some wonderful discussions with my students, including one student commenting, “Thinking about these people lets me know how good I really have it.  When I’m feeling down about something, my mom is always telling me it could be worse. She’s right.”  They also brought up the Kony 2012 film that came out this week, and that many of them watched.  This was great timing for me.

We had around 140 students join us for lunch to see what we were up to.  In each lunch session, some of my students took the lead to share the information we wanted to get across to the students.  They stepped up and really spoke with confidence. 

We divided the room up into different population areas in the world.  We marked the desks with colors that designated what people group they were a part of.  In each group we had 2 Americans, 3 Europeans, 4 Africans, 3 Latin Americans, and 18-19 Asians. 

Next we talked about poverty in American versus the extreme poverty that exists in Africa.  We talked about the causes of poverty in Uganda, including AIDS and civil war.

To bring it all home I had made a very large chocolate chip cookie for each group.  We divided up the cookie according to how wealth is distributed around the world.  It looked something like this.

We gave each group their share of the cookie and talked about how it was distributed.  Americans got one fourth of the cookie and Europeans got another fourth of the cookie.  Their pieces were huge and only shared by 2 or 3 kids.  The Asians got one third of the cookie but had to divide between a lot of kids.  Obviously, the Africans got the smallest piece and had to share it between 4 kids.

We talked about how it was just chance the way they got their piece of the cookie; just a matter of which seat they happened to sit in.  In the same way, we didn’t have any say about where we would be born.  Each group got to decide how to divide up the piece of the cookie they got.  They could keep it all, save it for later, share it with others…whatever they wanted to do.

It was such a good lesson.  It really made them think.  It made me think. 

I can’t wait for next week.