We started off the new year by revisiting our goals from the beginning of the year. Once we determined which ones we had met and which ones we still needed to work on, we listed different things that might influence whether or not we met our goals. For example: family + friends, commitment to the goal, personal habits. After determining what helped and hindered our success, students revised their current goals that they hadn't met yet and wrote new goals to replace ones they had accomplished.
To introduce the concept of perseverance, I read On a Beam of Light by Jennifer Berne, which tells the story of Albert Einstein's life. The students were surprised to find out that Einstein had trouble in school and that people did not always believe his theories. They were able to list many examples when he had to persevere in his life before he finally achieved his goals.
Watching Jesse's video about how he uses perseverance to overcome
challenges inspired my students to write about their own experiences
when they persevered and had a positive outcome.
Jesse talked about two different behaviours that help him to persevere: learning from mistakes and staying positive. So these became the focus of our next two lessons. We watched the video "Famous Failures" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLYECIjmnQs and shared our own experiences of when mistakes helped us to be more successful. Then we created positive attitude posters that would inspire others not to give up and to persevere.
Our final task was to write a blog teaching others about perseverance this month. After reviewing what we learned, we used the R.A.F.T. strategy to give students choice as to how they would write this opinion piece. We brainstormed different possible Roles they could take and who their Audience might be. Then we listed possible Forms their blog could take and what Topic (opinion) they were focusing on with their writing.
This was an excellent way to start the new year. We found many opportunities throughout the month to make connections to what we were learning about perseverance. Here is a list of times during the month when the students had to persevere to be successful.
As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.
Click here for a recording of the meeting. Click here to view the slides in Powerpoint formatting and here for slides in a PDF as you watch the recording.
Click here for this month's family newsletter in English and here for the newsletter in Spanish.
Click here for the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Perseverance!
This month's video lesson may contain several big points:
What Friendship embodies:
How to choose a friend, and why having friends with similar goals matters
How to introduce yourself to a new group, or include someone new in your group
How to manage relationships
Different ways to demonstrate Friendship
Exploring Friendship:
Vocabulary
Anti Bullying
Building a Support Team
Friendship on the Page
A challenge to the students that may include:
Spend time with a classmate they don’t normally socialize with
Show appreciation to their friends
Look for examples of friendship in literature and film
You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:
Planning for vocabulary development as needed
Preparing a Frayer model to make Friendship more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Friendship. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.
There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.
Vocabulary Development
Friendship may be a word that your bigs and littles know. Discussing what self awareness, empathy and loyalty can help students to know what they may already be practising in their daily life. Creating a wanted poster advertising for a friend can be a fun way to explore the new words!
Exploring Friendship:
Friendship is a skill that can be developed and a growth mindset can help students continue to grow into the friendships they develop, especially considering that maintaining relationships goes well into adulthood.
Using Fair Play is a great way to establish friendship and trust. Here is the link to the Fair Play Blogger to review ideas!
It can be fun to discuss and explore if friendship is just a human behavior or desire?
Here is a link to a short video of how a billy goat adopted a blind horse on a farm, avoiding the horse being put down. Their behavior demonstrates how animals can be in tune with each other’s needs in a way that crosses species and in surprising ways.
Using a graphic organizer can help to explore the different kinds of friends we have.
Managing Friendships:
Finding new friends can be intimidating and this is also true when old friends have a disagreement. Below are discussion questions to help students begin to consider their friendships:
How do you go about settling a disagreement?
How do you approach creating a new friend?
How do you react when someone wants to be your friend?
How can you identify similar interests with someone new?
Many of our Olympic athletes develop friendships despite their competition. Alex Rigsby and Bram Bailey play Women’s Hockey League and Akeem Haynes and Christian Taylor compete in track and field for different countries. How do competitors develop friendships?
Anti Bullying:
Bullying is an aspect that can affect friendships, learning how to navigate healthy and unhealthy friendships and what to do when you witness someone bullying your friend. We love the read aloud One by Kathryn Othoshi, about accepting each other’s differences and how it sometimes just takes one voice to make everyone count. Teachers also recommended the read aloud Zero, exploring value and self-worth.
A fun activity is to challenge your students to go a full week without name calling and discuss what they discover! This activity is based on a book Misfits, but does have a main character who is gay so know your audience.
Other great Friendship Ideas:
The topic of Friendship is also a great time to explore manners! So many ways to explore how manners change with environments, over time and with locations. Below are some potential discussion questions:
Are there different manners expected in the cafeteria vs. recess?
How expected manners are similar and how many are different?
Are manners cultural?
What should you do when someone is rude?
2) This is a good time to explore building a support team and recognizing who already is part of their team. Building a support system is something that the mentors know a lot about – and it relates to success with goals. Students might not realize it, but they are part of the mentors’ support teams now.
3) Online Friendships
More than 80% of students call their CC mentor a friend.
Connecting with people online is more and more common, at younger and younger ages. How can we help students to learn how to navigate healthy ways of exploring the internet?
Common Sense Media has endless resources and reviews for sites and online games from teachers and parents, including excellent lesson plans.
Lesson Ideas:
Teacher recommendations:
Something I was going to share that I did two years ago for Friendship month was "Friendship Friday". Each Friday in the month of February we did some sort of friendship activity. One day they ate lunch with someone different. Another day they played with some new at recess. One day they wrote positive notes to their friends. They also had days of random acts of kindness (giving a student pencils/paper, putting up or taking down someone's chair, helping them with their work, cleaning up a mess that was made, etc.)
My students loved this and I plan to have "Friendship Friday" again this year. You may share this idea if you don't already have it in the plans and if you think it is worth sharing. I just thought it was something different and kept Friendship month going all month.
Bucket Filling and Bucket dipping can give students a way to practise showing empathy to each other and to reflect on how to make healthy choices when interacting with each other. How to fill a Bucket by Carol McCloud is a great way to start!
Create a friendship bench for students to go to when they can't find a friend to play with so when another student see them, they invite them to come and play!
Olympic Values Education Program (OVEP):
CC has been working with the OVEP, and Heatherle was recently trained in the OVEP lessons. She’s put together some resources for everyone about The Olympic Truce, the Olympic Village, and some other topics that show friendship through sport. You might also run a google search of the Youth Olympic Games — the entire function of those games is to promote friendship through sport (Just like the Canada Games started by the first Prime Minister Trudeau!). This link will provide a wealth of resources!
Book Resources: Be sure to check the Planning Manual for more examples!
When exploring books it is always good to explore the text you have already worked with. Consider...
Analyzing books and stories you have read this year.
How many fictional pairs/groups can you come up with who have developed or had conflict within their friendships and found resolutions?
Why are Buddy Stories our favorite books and movies?
Kids Deserve It- Todd and Adam encourage you to think big and make learning fun and meaningful for students. While you’re at it, you just might rediscover why you became an educator in the first place.
The Undoing Project:A Friendship that Changed Our Minds- The Undoing Project is about the fascinating collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield—both had important careers in the Israeli military—and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.
Video Link to a Tedtalk with the legendary duo Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have been friends for decades. In a raw, tender and wide-ranging conversation hosted by Pat Mitchell, the three discuss longevity, feminism, the differences between male and female friendship, what it means to live well and women's role in future of our planet. "I don't even know what I would do without my women friends," Fonda says. "I exist because I have my women friends.”
I've been looking forward to discussing perseverance with my class and this month I had the chance to focus on it! We started our discussing by watching Lex's video. It was very powerful for the students to hear his story again. Lex has overcome a lot and we are inspired by his perseverance.
Our school is focusing on growth mindset this year and my class has heard a lot about it. The students and I talked about how having a growth mindset helps you persevere. Students were then asked to think about a time they that was difficult. They wrote about those times and explained how they got through them. My students have been through a lot! Some students focused on how they coped with the loss of a family member, while others focused on new skills they've learned. One student wrote a great story about how she learned to tie her shoes!
The next week we studied the poem by Myra Cohen Livingston. It's about a girl who gets roller skates and falls as soon as she puts them on. Even though she skins her knee and gets dirty, she brushes off the dirt and gets back up to try and skate. The students discussed the girl's attitude (she never gives up even though it would be easy to quit). It reminded them that persevering isn't always easy and that they must stay motivated.
Here we go again! Just as in years past, my students did not know the definition of perseverance when I asked them before showing Lex’s video. Ironically our class mission statement, that we wrote at the beginning of the year, has "never giving up" in it. They just never knew that meant perseverance. We even talked about never giving up as a theme in some of the poems we read the first week of the month. It was a true light bulb moment when they heard Lex talking about perseverance. “We’ve been talking about that all year!” shouted one student. In Lex's video this month, he shared with us how he lost his eyesight. His video is titled "Achieve Your Vision Through Perseverance". Since he talked about losing his sight and his motto is "No need for sight when you have a vision" we connected that into “Fun Friday” activities.
Lex’s Challenge
Lex challenged us to write about a time we had to overcome an obstacle and explain what we did to persevere through the challenging time. Here are all my students’ responses to Lex’s challenge.
Perseverance Challenges
Since Lex’s video was titled “Achieving Vision Through Perseverance” and he shared with us how he lost his sight and persevered through all his challenges, I decided to connect this to extra perseverance challenges this month. We completed these fun challenges each Friday during the month.
Shoe Tying Challenge
Students were blindfolded and had to put their shoes on and tie them. Most were successful and it took them the normal amount of time to tie their laces. Others were successful, but it took them longer than normal. I had one student tie his shoes on the wrong feet. He even said, “I thought something didn’t feel right, but I went with it anyways”. Another student could not tie them at all and ended up with a knotted mess.
Writing Challenge
Students were blindfolded and had to write “My name is …” on a piece of paper. Lex can write his autograph so why can't we write something too. One student tried to write with the eraser end because she was missing the eraser on her pencil and could not feel the difference. Most of my students did not have difficulty writing, but their actual handwriting was a whole different story. It was sloppier (which says something for some of them who already have rough handwriting), bigger, and wavier on the lines. Our classroom roared with laughter when they took their blindfolds off revealing what they had written.
Walking Challenge
Students were blindfolded and tried to walk from our classroom to the cafeteria. This path takes us down two long hallways. Each blindfolded student had a guide helping them along the way. Their techniques for walking were quite interesting and different. Some pairs walked holding arms, while others had the guide pushing or pulling the blindfolded partner. There were even a couple pairs who had the blindfolded partner trying to lead the seeing partner down the hallway. There was a lot of zigzagging, slow walking, and laughter filling the hallways during this challenge. This by far was my students favorite challenge.
Persevere Through Your Fears
Before students watched Lex's video, I had them write one thing they would be afraid to do in front of the class. Since they are 5th graders, most were like "Why? So you can make us do it?". I guess they know me too well because that was part of my plan. For the last “Fun Friday” challenge, I asked, “How many of you think you have perseverance and are willing to tackle our biggest challenge yet?”. All but two hands raised. When I revealed their notecards, their hands went down real fast. It was slow going at the start, but once a few students faced their fears and persevered, others were excited to join in on the fun. I am proud of the students who persevered. Some of my most shy and quiet students stood up in front of the class and faced their fears. We also had a lot of laughs. This challenge was so much fun!
Zoe hugged a friend.
Nataly did a handstand because she participates in gymnastics.
Devin and Sarahi danced.
Parrish snitched in front of the whole class.
Racheal lip synced and did hand motions to a song.
Crystal and Cordero sang.
David danced crazily.
Mikey talked in front of the class sharing science facts.
Perseverance with William Green
We were lucky to have former running back and first round draft pick for the Cleveland Browns William Green come speak to the 4th and 5th graders. Before his presentation, I told my students I would be willing to bet he would speak on perseverance. The first time he mentioned “never give up” and perseverance, my whole class looked at me. He also talked about dreaming big and having a vision for the future. There were moments during his presentation that we thought he was a Classroom Champions mentor and that he knew Lex. My students were fascinated with the connections. It was the perfect presentation for Perseverance month!
We have made progress in persevering through our obstacles, but we still need to keep persevering for success, especially in reading. I think we are going to have to set perseverance goals in this area for the remainder of the school year. #NeverGiveUp
Standards
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.2- Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.8- Recall relevant information from experiences or gather relevant information from print and digital sources; summarize or paraphrase information in notes and finished work, and provide a list of sources.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.4- Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade 5 reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies.
We started off the new year by revisiting our goals from the beginning of the year. Once we determined which ones we had met and which ones we still needed to work on, we listed different things that might influence whether or not we met our goals. For example: family + friends, commitment to the goal, personal habits. After determining what helped and hindered our success, students revised their current goals that they hadn't met yet and wrote new goals to replace ones they had accomplished.
Jesse talked about two different behaviours that help him to persevere: learning from mistakes and staying positive. So these became the focus of our next two lessons. We watched the video "Famous Failures" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLYECIjmnQs and shared our own experiences of when mistakes helped us to be more successful. Then we created positive attitude posters that would inspire others not to give up and to persevere.
