Lego Challenge

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Monday mornings look quite differently for us this year.  In the past, we've treated Monday like every other day of the week; the kids come in and do a warm-up.  However, since reading The Leader In Me book, we are being more deliberate in setting a time to build relationships.

This past Monday we decided to put our students into groups of four and have them engage in a Lego challenge.  Their task was to work together to build a robot.  While this was fun, it was not as easy as they thought it would be.

We ended this activity by completing a Plus/Delta chart so our students could reflect on the positive elements of this activity and what they found to be a struggle.  Their reflections were very insightful.

On the Plus side they felt their groups persevered through the difficulties of robots falling apart or ideas not working.  They were all happy with their end product and that everybody had a hand in making the robot.

The Delta side had comments such as it was hard to not have their ideas chosen or to include everybody's ideas.  They also felt there was some arguing happening in the group.

This Monday we are going to do another Lego challenge--they will make a class pet.  But, before we begin the challenge, as a class we will reflect on last week's Deltas.  We will come up with a plan on how to improve them.

Happy Monday to you all.

Kim and Anne

Tweet Tweet

September 10, 2017

To kick off our first writing project, Our Summer to Tweet About, we read How I Spent My Summer Vacation, by Mark Teague. From there, we tried a new activity from the book, Make Thinking Visible, by Ron Richhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison called Chalk Talk. This activity "asks learners to consider ideas, questions, or problems by silently responding in writing both to the prompt and the thoughts of others. It builds an understanding in a collaborative way."

After discussing How I Spent My Summer Vacation, we posed the question: What are your thoughts, questions, and wonderings about whether it is ok to fabricate stories to tell others? We used this question because we had an in-depth discussion on the truthfulness of the main character's recollection of his summer. This was our first attempt at digging deeper into a story, and we had no idea how it would go. We were pleasantly surprised at the "silent conversations." The kids had strong arguments for  both sides, that yes it was ok, or no it was not. This is our new favorite activity, and we plan to try it again next week when we read The Name Jar.

Then, we asked the kids to write a narrow, focused paragraph about their summer. We asked them not to fabricate too much, because we really wanted to know what they did. We wanted it so short, we called it a tweet. Thank you, Amy Lemons for the idea. The kids had a fun time reliving a fun summer time activity, as well as completing the craft that went with it. We plan to use this writing in the future when we introduce how to revise our writing.

Kim and Anne

A Little Win Win

Monday, September 4, 2017

Happy Labor Day!  We wanted to take a quick minute to share two of our newest activities we implemented into our classrooms last week.  Since attending the Get Your Teach On Conference and after reading The Leader In Me, we have been trying to make a more deliberate effort to establish stronger student relationships, while at the same time continuing to find new ways to engage the kids.

Our first activity focused on The Leader in Me's Habit #4--Win Win.   This habit focuses on being kind to others and finding ways to make everyone happy in different situations.  We played The Ring Toss game to help the kids understand this habit.  Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures of this so we will just explain it here.  This game is similar to horseshoes.  One student holds a pencil still on the ground.  Another student stands seven steps away and tries to toss a ring onto the pencil.  As they quickly discovered this is very difficult.  On the next round, the person with the pencil can help the ring tosser by moving the pencil off the ground to catch the ring, or move the ring closer to the tosser. They can do anything to help the tosser be successful.   We could tell the kids were having much more fun on this round from their screams and laughter.  The kids realized it is more fun to help each other so everyone is successful; hence win win!

The next activity to help our students understand Habit #4 was to making compliment bags.  We used these adorable patterns from Amy Lemon's Back To School Engagement Made Easy bundle. Throughout the week the kids wrote compliments to each other and slipped them into their bags.  On Friday they got to read all of their compliments and take their bags home.  They felt so good about the kind things their classmates said about them.  The kids also loved looking for compliments to give each other throughout the day.  One of the students said he did not want to take his bag home because he thought he could reread his compliments if he was ever having a bad day.  What a way to make this an even more meaningful activity.

Hope you all had a Happy Labor Day!  Have a wonderful week and good luck to all of you just starting school this week.

Kim and Anne