What do the five kids below have in common?
Thayden, 6th grade, a student with very little focus to do the thing that his teacher is asking him to do and a tremendous amount of focus to work on his own goals.
Mason, 6th grade, a student who would just rather not.
Bram, 6th grade, for whom the act of writing is nearly impossible and who longs to fit in, but can not quite figure how to make that happen.
Gioia, 5th grade, a student for whom learning to read has been so much work.
Sierra, 3rd grade, is just quirky.
None of them quite fit into a school model;teachers and parents fret over their school success. Yet, they all completed this year’s library math logic challenge: Rush Hour. They completed all 40 consecutive challenges- except Sierra, who completed it twice.
I am the coordinator of a k-8 library in a charter school. There has been no money spent on anything in the library except library software and books. The library has sitting space for 12 including floor pillows, sofa, and tables. There are no formal library periods. Kids come into the library in the cracks of their day with their teacher’s permission.
Last year, kids could bring their laptops into my library during recess to free-write on their laptop. To write the stories that the kids wanted to write, they had to look cool things up on the internet. Then they had to show their friends the cool things on the internet and it was not too long before the students were in a whirlpool of ungoverned internet searches.
I found this time consuming and difficult to monitor. I grew sad as the kids were obsorbed in their screens and did not notice the books. So last summer I looked for something to bring kids into the refuge of the library, but far from screens.
My software engineer son and lover of math and logic suggested Rush Hour.
Rush Hour is a one person logic game with 40 challenges, each a little harder than the last, made by THINKFUN. One plays on a 6 square by 6 square grid. There are 40 challenge cards which indicate where the player should initially place the two-or-three-square-covering-cars-or -buses on the grid. The object is to slide all the cars horizontally or vertically to allow one particular car, the red one, to move off of the board and escape the traffic jam. Players who enjoy it are from 6 to adult. It is easy to set up and put away. It costs $20.00. Many other companies make similar games.
So I brought Rush Hour to my library. I put a chart graph paper on the hall library bulletin board. On the verticle axis was a place for kids’ names and on the horizontal axis was a the numbers 1-40. On the bottom of the board, I put a picture of the game and the words Library Math Challenge: Rush Hour.
It was a couple of weeks into school before anyone asked me about it. I showed two third graders how to play together as a team. Someone saw them playing and wanted to try it. Kids always asked me, “What do I get if I sign up? Is there a prize?” My answer was “nothing” and “no”.
It was not long before one game was not enough, nor was two. Many lunch recesses, I had three games in use with kids watching and suggesting moves.
In the space of the academic year, 75 out of 184 elligible kids signed up for the Rush Hour challenge. About half made it to somewhere in the 30’s. 5 made it all the way to the end. One of those 5 did it twice, once with two different challenge sets. One 6th grader did all the challenges in about eight days, most kids took months.
My effort and hope has always been to make the libary the center of the extended Odyssey learning community as well as a place that every kid in the school will remember forever as having been “their space”.