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World Cafe
First Grade, Stacey Stevenson

World Café is a teaching technique that helps students think deeply about issues by asking them to find evidence of various trends and concepts in what they are reading. 

When we do World Café in first grade, we modify it quite a bit, since some of the children are not yet reading and writing and their attention spans are short. It actually can take us up to 2 or three weeks to prepare and go through the whole process. The text that we analyze is usually a picture book or a chapter book that I am reading to the children.  Last year, for example, I read them James and the Giant Peach and we did a World Cafe on several of the chapters.

First we talk as a whole group about what concepts we will be looking for in our discussion, for example, change over time, or ethics.  I show them the icon and we talk about the concept in our own lives or in school. Sometimes, when we are talking about change over time, I will take some copies of pictures from the book for them to sequence. In this case, the children also created watercolor pictures with three panels showing how things changed over time in the book.

We also talk about expectations throughout the whole process.  First, we talk about what a “World Café” is and that we are going to have one.  There will be five tables and each will have a discussion about a different concept or icon.  There will be a Table Host at each of the tables. We talk about the responsibilities of the Table Host and the responsibilities of the people who are visiting the table.  I keep it very serious and they take it very seriously.   They ask a lot of questions about “How does that work?” “How does that look?”

On the first day, all of the children stay at one table, talking about one icon. There are no hosts on the first day. We will have talked as a class about the icons at each table.  In addition, I give prompts to each table to help the children remember what they are focused on.  
 
On the second day, each table talks about a different icon, and the children rotate through each table.  I choose Table Hosts based upon who seemed to understand what was going on during the first day.   In the upper grades, there is a recorder at each table that takes notes, but in first grade we use sticky pads to record ideas.

For James and the Giant Peach, we used the icons change over time, multiple perspectives, ethics, convergence, and patterns. Here are examples of some of the children’s comments from the World Cafe:
 
Ethics:
“It isn’t right that the Aunts are so mean to James.”
“The Aunts made James do all the chores.”
“The Aunts kicked James out at night.”
“Centipede isn’t kind to glow worm.”
 
Convergence:
(So far in the story, what came together or had to happen to make the peach grow so big?)
“James met a man that gave him a bag of magical green things.”
“The green magical things went into the soil.”
“James’ parents were killed by a rhino.”
“James had to be sad in order to go into the bushes to meet the man with the bag.”
“James had to move in with the mean Aunts.”
 
At the end, I take all the stickies with the children’s comments and record them on wall charts.  We have a discussion as a whole group about how the process went and what we should remember for next time.