What you see depends on where you stand

The third grade’s theme for the year is “what you see depends on where you stand.”

The conversation starts small, with picture books like Brendan Wenzel’s They All Saw a Cat and, of course, the parable of the visually impaired men and the elephant.

By the end of the year, they will have brought this lens to their study of the Tainos and pre-Columbian life in North America, to a review of the women’s sufferage movement in the US, and the history-making stories they will present in their Courtyard of Changemakers.

It’s a lot of ground to cover, especially when the students are continually trying to challenge their assumptions, to acknowledge their biases and to get to the shared truth of the experiences we all have in common.