Community Lesson - Nov/Dec

Community Lesson - Nov/Dec

Community is a great topic for our school - we even include it in our school name: GH Dawe Community School! At our school, we teach about  7 Strengths for Success.  Our school’s character strength of the month is HOPE, which fits well with the Classroom Champions theme.

Here is a snippet from GH Dawe’s HOPE lesson for the month of December:

Sadly, bad things happen in our world. Some times they are big tragedies that affect cities or even countries (earthquakes, floods, etc), and sometimes they affect only you, like a bad hair day or your friend moving away. But everyone has bad days. Even things that are little problems may seem huge at the time and can really get you down.

That’s why we need to have hope. Successful people don’t let these bad situations ruin their hopeful attitude.

How do you know if you have hope?

• I can create a good future for myself.
• I focus on the good things in my life.
• I think everything will be okay.

What if you don’t have hope? Can I learn to be hopeful? YES!  You can train your brain to have hope.

After watching the videos shared with us by Arianne Jones, we brainstormed all the communities of which we are a part. Here is a picture of our mind map:

Arianne inspired us to do something to have a positive impact or give back to our community, so we each set a goal of one thing we would focus on before the end of December. When we return from Christmas break, we will reflect on how we did, how it made us feel to give back, and how we can continue to have a positive impact beyond the holiday season. Here are some pictures of our ideas:

On that note, an opportunity crossed my desk to begin a new recycling campaign at our school. Our school already recycles paper, bottles/cans/juice boxes, batteries, and broken or used up plastic pens/highlighters/mechanical pencils.  With the help of Staples (office supply store), our class is going to manage a program for recycling foil wrappers from fruit snacks and granola bars. We hope this will have a big impact on our school community and the environment by reducing our trash.

We look forward to keeping more trash out of our landfill and keeping our community clean and green!