Go fish!

This is one of my favorite Pilgrims' memories. The second day we were there our trainer Marie told us The Parable of the Dolphin. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a person interested in developing NLP went to a dolphin training center. There he observed a dolphin trainer at work - the one others had told him was the best. He did nothing special during training - when a dolphin did something well, he'd give it a fish. The NLP person wondered how come this trainer was the best, up until an evening he found him sitting at pool side talking to the dolphin, stroking him and giving it fish. "Why are you giving the dolphin fish?" asked the NLP person. "Just because." the trainer said. 

On that note, Marie gave us two pieces of paper each. A fish was printed on one side, the other side was blank. Our task was to give fish to people we noticed had done something well, as small as it might have been. It took on - fish were swimming across the group for the rest of our stay in Canterbury. Marie got a blue paper fish bowl with a hand-made fish from each of us at the end of our course. :)

My very own fish bowl <3

We all loved giving and receiving fish, some of us so much we started thinking about bringing some shape or form of it in to the classroom. We discussed it a couple of times and a few questions arose:

• What if a person in the class doesn't receive a fish? It happened to one of us the first day, and they were a bit hurt. Should the teacher react in some way? What if kids give out fish only to their friends and/or those they wish would like them? 
• A fish is a symbol closely connected to Christianity. Not everyone is comfortable with that, so think a little of your classes and maybe choose a different symbol - that means the parable probably won't work as the introduction, so think about the ways you could do it.

I hope you like the idea.

All my love, 

Do

P.S.
For another example of working with the fish click HERE.