We're on a Odyessy of the Mind!

In December I spent two fabulous weeks in California seeing all my friends and family that I could pack into that time.  I ate so much good food and was lucky to hang out with my niece who is the most adorable child on the planet. It was a much needed break from my isolated life here, but now I'm back and pushing ahead at full steam.  One thing I'm really excited about now that I'm back here is our first Maritime Region Odyssey of the Mind competition.  For those of you who have never heard of OotM, its a national competition in America that encourages creative thinking, spontaneous problem solving, and team work.  OotMs philosophy is that creativity can be learned through practice just as much as any other skill and that's what I'm trying to teach my students.

Students try to find a way to drop an egg without it breaking.

Some of the volunteers in my region have formed teams that will compete this April performing spontaneous hands on tasks as well as a long term problem requiring the the team create an apparatus that can help someone who is handicapped and then perform a humorous sketch demonstrating how it works.  My team, which meets for two hours every Monday, has been practicing hands on challenges, some verbal challenges, and team work problems.  You really start to see how much creativity and critical thinking is lacking in the students lives.  There is a lot of forcing of solutions and mocking of all new ideas, so I think what we are doing is going to have a huge impact on the problem solving abilities of the students we work with.

Students trying to turn over the fabric without stepping off.

The biggest challenge I'm facing with my team is to incite original ideas.  So far the things they have suggested as an aid to the handicapped are crutches, canes, a motorized wheel chair.  I can't answer the problem for them, so I just have to keep encouraging them to try harder to think outside of the box.  Can we think of some humorous task or something more non traditional than limited mobility which would affect someone with a disability? Their homework is to come up with something super creative, but so far we're stuck on crutches.  However, I'm not worried.  Once the students start feeling confident in expressing new and potentially controversial ideas, I am confident they will come up with something creative.

In other news, I've got cats coming out of my ears.  When I returned from Morocco I realized one cat was pregnant.  When I came back from America to five new kittens, I also found that my other cat was pregnant.  I am now the temporary owner of 2 cats and 7 kittens.  While cute, its a bit much and so I'm hoping to find them all homes where they will be loved and not eaten.  I'm really not sure how easy that task shall be...