Kid's Brains

Are weird, but tasty. I have been doing a Christmas lesson all week with second-year students. The lesson has two parts. One is a worksheet. At the top is a box with about ten Christmas related words, about half of which the kids don't know. Under that are ten sentences about Christmas with blanks in them. I made it a little difficult on purpose because I am trying to get them to think about what clues the sentence is giving them, not trying to translate the whole thing (as they are taught to do.) Also I am trying to get them to say "Help. What's this?" In English. I included words like Hannukah and Kwanzaa to see what they would do when they have no clue. Usually about 6-7 kids in a class of 35-40 could get all of them right in about 10-15 minutes. That is pretty okay I think. They would usually switch around Hannukah and Kwanzaa, but that means that their instincts were right. After about 15 minutes, we stop and check. Then I gave out another worksheet. This time it was a wordsearch with about 20 Christmas words. It is nuts, the human brain. The kids who did so well at the fill in the blank can get about 6-10 words in 10 minutes. The kids who just stared at the fill in the blank come close to finishing. 1-2 kids will tear through the wordsearch, finding the words in order even, and finish well before everyone else. Very odd thing to watch. Just reinforces, I guess, that there are many kinds of 'smart.'