It's A Livable Life?  

The 5th grade boys work together to answer the driving question, How do we as future working citizens/permanent residents, ensure that there is a livable wage in our country?  Through research and inquiry the boys work to understand what minimum wage in the US is and consider cost of living in numerous geographic areas in an attempt to discover whether it is livable.  

The project is divided into two parts; local and global.  

As an action component, the boys then set out to understand what local organizations in San Francisco are doing to alleviate poverty and are given voice and choice to share their knowledge with our school community and beyond.  In past years, the boys have created commercials and petitions to accomplish this. 

After looking at our local and national statistics on poverty, and in most cases discovering that the national minimum wage is not livable, the boys are usually interested in looking at global statistics.  Using unicef, www.ifitweremyhome.com, and gapminder.org we gather statistics, and discuss graphs, scatter plots, stem and leaf plots, mean, median and mode.  

Emphasis of this project is looking out for our local, "glocal" community first, however the introduction of international organizations such as Heifer International through a reading of Beatrice's Goat with the 1st grade is included in the project.  

Please feel free to read about one year's journey in the blog from December 2012 to March 2013.