I seem to have lost the message I started, so here goes again.  Fascinating first day.  Just in case my first message is lost in cyberspace, I am, in reality, Ellen Davidson.  My name may appear as Elena Batdavid, a Latina/Hebrew blend that one of my daughters made up when setting up my gmail account. One of the fun aspects of having your own offspring as your tech assistants.

I was looking up a link for the the Blue Eye/Brown Eye model done in third grade. It's called "A Class Divided." Here's the link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

This entry is around what we need to do to make some of the underlying ideas of revolution accessible to elementary age children.  One of my commitments in teaching is to push and challenge my students, of any age, beyond what they think they can learn.  And just as clearly to help them embrace this challenge by making big ideas developmentally accessible so truly they can consider them.  One of these ideas is about unfairness and what happens with people who have been treated unfairly even for a day, no less for years and generations.  In addition to "A Class Divided" I explain some additional activities below.

I have a set of activities I do around economic unfairness. Some are classics. One that may be well known, I'm not sure, is a snack sharing activity where, in a classroom, one child gets an elaborate ice cream sundae representing the richest people, 5 or 6 each get an apple, representing middle class people who have enough but not a huge surplus, and then the other children each get a single raisin representing underfed people of the world.  You need to adjust these percents, and thus the actual numbers, to fit whether you are doing the world, the US, your community, etc.  This activity makes real unfair food distribution!  Lots to discuss after it and for days and weeks to come.

Another set of activities is also around resource distribution and not so inflammatory.  For example we do races where a few children run as fast as they can, a few run backwards, a few hop, a few have their ankles tied together and run that way, and a few aren't allowed to move at all.  As you might expect, one of the children who is allowed to just run usually wins the race.  Again you need to have the size of each group reflect what you're teaching with real world data. And the key here is also in the discussion.

 A third idea, also on unfair resource distribution, is an assigned project say to research a country, or perhaps to make a poster.  Children are assigned groups and supplies.  In the research project one group might have a stack of books as well as internet access down to a group that is only given a single dictionary or perhaps one book unrelated to their topic. With the posters some groups get colored markers, tissue paper, construction paper, scissors etc. down to one group that gets a white poster board and a pencil.

I do all those with children as a precursor to learning about one of the whys around revolution.

One of my favorite adult activities is "Star Power."  One time when I did this with a teacher group we took a bathroom break before we discussed, I went to the multi-stall bathroom and was in one stall where I heard two teachers talking in adjacent stalls. I couldn't see who they were but I heard one say to the other, "Now I know why there are armed revolutions."  Last year I taught this in a grad class and it was an incredibly powerful lesson on socioeconomic class. Students discussed it repeatedly for the whole rest of the semester.  Here are a few links, many more are easy to find.
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn151starpowered
http://www.whatsrace.org/pages/starpower.htm