West Leadership Weekly Round Up: August 20th - 24th

Greetings!

We had a fun and exciting first week back to school here at West Leadership Academy! The semester is off to a fun start with new students, a new classroom, and new opportunities to grow and learn.

8th period listing out their courses and grade goals for the year

With West Leadership Academy moving towards block scheduling Monday - Thursday and all classes on Friday, students and teachers took this first week to get to know each other and acclimate to the new system. On Monday and Tuesday I was able to meet with all of my classes and introduce myself, the YESS program, and the exciting plans we have in store for the school year. Many of my former mentees and mentors returned which is very exciting and will definitely help to ensure a strong start to the semester.

 On Wednesday and Thursday our class time was spent getting to know each other through a variety of games and activities. We started with a fun "Whodunit" game where students were asked to write down something interesting, funny, or silly about themselves and then other students would guess "whodunit". It was already cool to see some new students open up and share some really fascinating insights into their lives. We certainly have some pretty awesome students. From there we had a fun general trivia Kahoot that got pretty competitive (it always does when snacks are on the line) and students seemed to enjoy some of the silly questions I wrote for them. In addition to the fun and games, some students already had questions about academics and grades so I also took the time on Wednesday and Thursday to have students write out their courses, goal grades for each course, and goal GPA. We broke down how to calculate GPA and will certainly continue to revisit these topics during our tutoring time. It was good to see students being interested about their grades already and I think with our new block schedule we will have even more time to focus on accomplishing these academic goals.

Students chatting and getting to know each other

Finally on Friday we had all classes for shortened 50 min periods. During this time we started off with our Fishbowl Friday activity where students are asked to write down a question, a topic, or just a general talking point that they'd like to be brought up anonymously to the class. Additionally we spent some time playing a social barometer game called Take A Stand where students choose a position (Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree) on various topics. This was pretty fun to see students have differing opinions on the issues and explain/justify their position.

Overall a great first week here at WLA and with that I am very excited to see what's to come! Stay tuned! -Ben