We have had a busy first 6 weeks here in Oregon. My 5th grade class has been busy learning new routines and starting off the new school year. The students were very excited to learn that they would be taking part on Classroom Champions this year. BUT when we had open house for the parents, the parents were even more excited at the opportunity their kids were getting. Some of the parents were excited because they recognized Meryl Davis from Dancing with the Stars! But the parent were so appreciative and energized after watching the welcome video, it actually made me feel so proud it brought tears to my eyes. So as my eyes watered I had the chance to discuss with the students and their families what a truly amazing experience this was going to be this year.
We spent several days talking about our Welcome to our Journey video and had planned on working with the HIgh School Video production class to help film it (We have no resources here to make videos) but that plan did not work, so we ended up reaching out to the community and asking for help. We had a community member that teaches a video production class during the summer come and help us film our welcome video. The kids loved seeing themselves on youtube, they ask daily if we can watch the video again. We received wonderful feedback from our administrators, district office and the PARENTS loved it. The gentlemen that came in to film it offered to come in and work with the class on other projects also!
In the middle of September we starting talking about Goal setting. We watched our mentor videos and discussed short term and long term goals. As a class we worked on short term goals for the first several weeks. I asked students to think about a year long goal for several days. We have celebrated many of the short term goals that students have already met and we continuously have to review what a measurable goal is (they want to write “I will get better” ) We are finally getting it down each week to write SMART goals. The first of October we finally wrote our year long goals. I introduced the students to “OneWord” which is a movement (and a book) that has people focus on one word that would describe their ideal self. This was a little hard with 5th graders but we spent some time on it and each student came up with one word that they wanted to focus on. (examples, Grit, athletic, dependable, successful) Then they made a poster with their one word, an inspirational quote to go with it, a picture of themselves and their year long goal) I love the results and we have them posted on our biggest bulletin board.
We are off to a great start and the kids are posting questions for our Mentors on our “wonders” wall. We can not wait to talk to Meryl and Charlie next month.
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