November Update - Communities

Jamestown students were very excited to get to meet and chat with Clark live! We enjoyed learning a little more about him. 

He has tasked to come up with was to make our communities better. Students have come up with ideas for our school community. Some of those ideas are to have class deputy mayors for each of the sixth grade classes to help things run more smoothly, become study buddies for younger students, and to use some of our recess time to make sure our campus is litter free.

Meeting Summit, Clark’s rescue dog, inspired us to come up with a different task to help our bigger community. We have decided to collect items for our local animal shelter. 

Students have begun to bring items in and Mayor James will take them to the shelter on our last day of school before winter break.

We also got a wonderful surprise today! Our Classroom Champions t-shirts, pencils, folders, stickers, and bracelets arrived today! 

Students were thrilled! 

A few pictures of students working on some of our plans for our school:

Jumping Into Community: November

We are working everyday to be better leaders in all of our communities; classroom, school (B.T. Bullock Elementary), Classroom Champions, home, neighborhood, and Sanford NC. It is not always easy, but we are trying our best. It is a work in progress. Thank you Lex for teaching us how to be leaders in our communities in this month's video lesson. After watching Lex’s video, we jumped right into brainstorming community projects for our classroom, school, and local community. We quickly realized a simple act of kindness can make a huge difference in any one of our communities.

Lex's Challenge: Part 1

Lex challenged us to create a positive plan for one of our communities and put the plan into action. We came up with several plans because just one plan did not seem fitting. Some of our plans have already been completed, while others are still in action. Before Thanksgiving break, students made “Thank You” cards to individual staff members at our school that have made a difference in their education so far. (I didn’t let them write to me because I wanted them reaching out to other adults.) We also wrote “Thank You” cards to every aspect of our school; all teachers and TA’s, office staff, administration, cafeteria, custodial, bus drivers, tutors. If they work at our school, we wrote them a “Thank You”. In addition to this class plan, students have had individual plans in motion. Some have volunteered their time raking leaves, donating money to charity, cleaning up at the horse stables, and helping their parents. They are excited to continue their random acts of kindness into December and beyond community months.

(Students took responsibility and filmed this video all on their own.)

 

 

Bragging About Ourselves

Every student in our school has their own necklace of brag tags. Students can earn them for being a “Leader on TRACK”, meeting their accelerated reader goal, having perfect attendance for the quarter, and mastering their multiplication facts. Our first brag tag celebration was at the beginning of the month. Each student was recognized for their individual accomplishments. We celebrated together and set goals for students to earn more brag tags in January.

Inspiring Community

Each month at our staff meetings we have a "You Inspire Me" award that a staff member gives to another staff member. For the month of November, I was recognized by another teacher for the inspirations she sees in me. This was a great example of a community recognizing each other for their hard work and perseverance.

To be continued in December...

We will be continuing Lex's challenge into the month of December. In addition to our small acts of kindness, we will be working on a project for the Lee County Sheriff's Department. We will be making holiday cards and crafts for our elderly community members who do not have any family or friends in town. The Sheriff's Department will deliver these for us as they make their holiday rounds. We cannot wait to spread our love to community members we do not know. Stay tuned to see what we create!

Standards

ELA: W.5.4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience SL.5.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions

Dreaming Big in Small Pieces

One of the biggest challenges we have in understanding goal setting is making them realistic.  It is hard for the kids to understand that some goals are impossible to achieve in the short term, but that they become possible eventually, and they can set other goals that will keep them on track for success in achieving the long term goal. For example, many of my students want to be NFL or NBA players.  When I ask them to set short term goals (goals that can be reached within a month or so), that is still their goal.  If I ask them to set a goal that can be reached by the end of the school year, that is still their goal.  I even bring up those particular goals in our discussions and talk about how they can't be reached for many years. So, one of the things we work on all year long is breaking down long term goals into short term goals.

This year we added goal setting pages to our agendas.  They look like this:

As you can see, we are trying to help them break goals down into simple steps.  Since we started talking Goal Setting before we watched the video, this was a great chance to reinforce the idea of setting a path of goals instead of just thinking of it as one giant goal. Before we watched the Goal Setting video, we watched the video of Ms. Simmonds and her crew winning the gold medal in Rio.  The kids had a blast, and it made me laugh to watch them.  They were really encouraging the USA to win, yelling just like it was a football game (and we take football seriously in Oklahoma!).  It was funny to me because they already knew she won!

                                    

Once we watched the goal setting video, we discussed what kind goals Ms. Simmonds set in order to get to Rio.  We talked about how long that would take and what kinds of things she had to do. Then we tried to apply that to our own goals.  One of the things they thought was really neat was that Ms. Simmonds has a goal journal like they do.

Our challenge was to come up with one large goal and then break it down into two smaller goals that would help them achieve that goal.  I narrowed it down a bit and asked them to come up with a goal that could be completed within one month and then to break that down.  We still struggled.  We'll keep working!

First, I had them write down their ideas on their own.  

Then I had them work in pairs to talk about what their goals were and what kind of steps they needed to take to reach them.

Finally, I had them share their plans with a larger group.

Outside of the sports goals, most of them wanted to work on their reading.  We had a great discussion on what a reasonable amount of reading was.  I still had goals that said they wanted to read 50 books in one week, but it's a start! And, at least they want to read!

We are...

...very behind in introducing ourselves!  It's been a busy beginning of the year here, but things are settling into a routine.  So, here is a little bit about ourselves.  First, we are a second grade class in Oklahoma.  We are pretty much right in the middle of the state and near one of our major cities, Oklahoma City.  The kids were really excited to see that Ms. Simmonds was our athlete because they see the rowers out on the river all the time!

I'll start by introducing myself.  My name is Christine Paradise, and this is my twelfth year teaching.  I've taught 5th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd grades.  Currently I'm teaching 2nd grade as well as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Club.

Here is a quick video to show you what our class looks like.

To introduce themselves, I asked my kids to create a piece of art using one word that best describes them.  It was a great way for me to get to know them a bit, and it turned out to be very interesting.  A few weeks later, I can say they are pretty accurate as well! I'm looking forward to seeing what they choose at the end of the year.

Our final activity was to create a poem to describe our class.  We've been reading some poems about athletes, so this format was based on one of those:

Miss P.'s Class

Family
Teamwork
Never give up
Super intelligent, fantastically smart
Happy, funny, silly, sarcastic, awesome
Nice, kind, respectful, responsible, careful, proactive

Fair Play with Room 27!

Discussing Fair Play During Our Morning Meetings: 

Watching Lex Gillette's new videos and discussing our monthly Classroom Champions topic has become a favorite way for students to start the day.  They really enjoyed the variety examples of videos we viewed that demonstrated athletes having good sportsmanship and "playing fairly."

Appreciating Fair Play:

Every Friday classmates participate in an appreciation circle, bringing our week to a close with a reflection and appreciation for others who have made their school-week better in some way.  This month students were encouraged to reflect on how others' fair play effected them.  Students had great appreciations to share - especially about how they were including each other in games on the playground!

Playworks: 

This is the first month my students were able to participate in Playworks Class Game Time.  Students quickly made the connections between the fair play discussions we've been having in class and the skills that are re-enforced by Coach Jake.

Meeting Lex Gillette: 

The absolute highlight of this month was meeting Lex Gillette and Steve Mesler!  They answered questions and prompted us to re-visit our goal setting from September, as well as to think about how we can demonstrate fair play at school.  Meeting these two Olympians was an amazing experience the students are still talking about.

Our Skit:

Our project this month was to have students work in groups to develop a skit that demonstrated fair play.  After scripts were done, one was chosen to record out on the playground.  Here is the first (and unedited) version!

Fair Play in Grade 2S at PPS

Fair Play is such an important part of life, whether it's at home, in the classroom, or on the playground, After watching +Justin Snith and +Tristan Walker's video, the children realized that respect is a huge part of  fair play. The children used their background knowledge to brainstorm examples and non-examples of fair play.

We read mentor texts Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns About Sportsmanship by Howard Binkow and I've Won, No I've Won, No I've Won by Lauren Child. The students really enjoyed these books and were able to relate situations in the text to examples in their own life. I then read several stories from Brad Herzog's Inspiring Stories of Sportsmanship. One that really impacted my students was the story of  Sara Tucholsky, the softball player that hit the only home run of her career, but was unable to run the bases after hurting herself at first base. The opposition then carried her around the bases, knowing that this meant a loss for them. We then watched the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttkBP2XDZvE, What an amazing display of sportsmanship!

Keeping with my baseball theme, the children wrote what fair play meant to them, as well as an example of a time that they showed fair play.

The children are now working on skits about fair play as a culminating activity. The children are acting out different scenarios, with the children first showing how children might react when they aren't showing fair play, followed by how the scenario might play out when fair play is demonstrated. These skits will be posted soon!

Fair Play Wrap Up

The Grade 5's have been working so hard this week to finish our fair play projects. We started this week by reviewing what fair is because we had a whole week out of the school and a whole week not speaking English! Then we created fair play "rules."

After we had some specific rules to work from we created story boards of people showing our fair play rules.

We then voted on our favourites. I gave each student a sticker for each "Rule" and they voted on which drawing best showed that rule. 

Next we split into groups and used our favourite story board pictures to create tableaus about fair play!

I then printed out the images on paper and we started creating posters to teach others about fair play.

And here is the finished product!

Thanks so much Jesse! We had a blast with Fair Play and a ready for community in T minus 2 days and counting!!

Grade 5 - Akulivik