Tomorrow’s Visualisation Exercise

Holy busy, Batman!

Sweet mother of all things human, I’m busy. Even taking the ten minutes to write this post feels like I’m cheating on my commitment to learning how to teach students.

Did you know that I have every minute of every school day mapped out for the next three weeks?

Anyway, tomorrow at 9:30 am EST I will be conducting a visualisation exercise with the students to introduce the science unit on space. I wrote it up, so I thought I’d share it with you, after having left you so lonely for so very long.

Image Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Worker_ant_carrying_leaf.jpg
Image Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Worker_ant_carrying_leaf.jpg

Here it is:

Imagine that you are an ant. You wake up in the morning, and stretch out your six legs. First the three on the left, and then the three on the right. You fall over a little bit, because you’re still pretty tired. You’ve got a big day ahead of you.

You grab some breakfast, a nice fresh bit of leaf that you found yesterday while you were out. It’s a bit dry, from having been in the anthill overnight, but it’s still refreshing. You are starting to feel better about the day ahead of you.

You wish the Queen Ant good morning when she walks by, and she smiles at you. You finish up your breakfast, brush your mandibles, and put one shoe on each foot. Then, you begin the climb out of the anthill, following your buddies.

Once you reach the top of the anthill, the sun beats down on you, and it’s warmth feels nice on your back. You are ready for the march ahead.

You’ve reached your destination for today, after a 100-meter long march. It’s a large, green, leafy plant that you’ve only ever seen from a distance. You notice that one of your shoes has come untied, so you lace it up before climbing the stem.

You keep climbing, and climbing. You’re getting pretty tired, and you look down to see how high you’ve climbed. You’re almost 30 cm in high! You can’t remember the last time that you’ve been so high. Only five more centimeters to go.

You’re there! You’re on the strongest branch, with the most leaves on the entire plant! You march confidently out to a leaf that is glistening in the sun. You know that that is what you’re going to take home with you tonight.

You walk, carefully, out onto the leaf. It’s shaking a bit, and your feet are feeling unsteady beneath you. You start cutting the leaf free from the branch. It’s pretty hard work, but, then, the best leaves always are tough to cut away.

You’ve almost cut the leaf away, when suddenly, from out of nowhere, a gust of wind comes rushing by! Woosh! You close your eyes out of fear.

When you open your eyes, you look around and realize that you’re floating, high, really high, above the ground. You peak over the edge of the leaf, and see the world below from a bird-eye view.

Don’t you wish that I were your teacher?

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