Patriotic

My middle school ICT teacher has had a bit of a melt down and I / he and I have had to implement a new strategy. New units for all classes, short sweet high impact learning, hoping to engage and motivate the boys, lots of team teaching and I have been really firm on expected and acceptable behaviour. I was working with Grade 8 today, and doing the spreadsheeting activity using Skittles. The boys have been a bit rumpity lately so I was told. I had spelled out exactly what they were supposed to be doing and supplied the paper to do it on. They needed to hand this in as part of the continuous assessment. Usual boys trick the world over, no pen and no paper. So the boys were to sort and group the Skittles and record the numbers so that next lesson they could input the information into the spreadsheet. One patriotic and creative student had arranged his coloured Skittles to represent the UAE national flag. Red, green. white and black. In my book that deserves another 5% for higher order thinking! Maybe they weren't rumpity just bored. Today they engaged. Was it good teaching? Was it the activity? Did it have a context? Was it my style or was it the Skittles? Time will tell, but the kids over here sure love their candy.