Community, Aspiration, Resilience, Emotional: Homelessness in New York
Geography: Compare London with a contrasting non-European city
As a ‘spin-off’ from their Geography work, Year 5 have been learning about homelessness in New York.
They were given the chance to reflect on their own experiences of learning from home during lockdown.
In New York, like in the UK, schools closed abruptly in March 2020.
The children learnt the story of Prince, who found himself plodding through Google Classroom on his mum’s phone. He and his mother had been homeless for nearly all of his academic life.
They learnt about the context of Prince’s story and his background in Harlem – the northern section of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The children looked at maps to gain a better locational understanding of Prince’s family.
The Year 5 children learnt that the city has more than 100,000 homeless schoolchildren. The number of homeless people in New York has risen to its highest point since the Great Depression. The largest demographic within this population is children.
The children were encouraged to think about how they would spend their time if they were in this situation.
The children went on to read the rest of Prince’s story, along the way identifying some of the challenges that he encountered, along with some of the ways in which he overcame these.
Despite all of the challenges, Prince and his mother kept up his education, attending every parents’ evening, checking in daily with the teacher, completing all of homework set and taking home free books that were available at the entrance of the school.
In a subsequent lesson, the children used their skills with abstract nouns to describe the ways in which Prince may have felt during his time learning from home, whilst also being homeless.
In this session, our collaborative learning approach was applied, using a write round to generate appropriate abstract nouns.
In the final part of this project, the children created freeze frames to represent community and resilience, based on this story oh homelessness.
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