Jumping Into Community December

We were excited to continue community month into December. We have so much to offer all of our communities. It is amazing to see how excited my students get when they can share their talents with others. We began December by watching Lex’s community video again and reflecting on what we accomplished in November. We continued to brainstorm all the activities we would complete in December. Some students decided they wanted to keep doing what they were doing and we all agreed that was just fine.

Lex's Challenge: Part 2

Lex challenged us to create a positive plan for one of our communities and put the plan into action. Last month for our class project we wrote “Thank You” cards to all the staff members at our school right before Thanksgiving. Our class project this month was to make holiday cards and crafts for the Lee County Sheriff’s Department. Every student had a ton of fun making their crafts. The buzz of excitement was contagious and I’m so proud of how happy they were to complete this project. They do not even know who the people are that will be receiving their gifts of kindness. That makes this project that more special.

 

 

 

 

Individual Acts of Kindness

Students used our bulletin board to display their acts of kindness from our school and home communities. We are proud to share our love with the community. It is, after all, part of our school’s mission statement “To Love, To Learn, To Lead”.

“I sang in the Christmas parade.” -Tamiya

“I helped my neighbor cut wood.” -Mikey

“I helped cut my neighbors grass.” -Jose

“I picked up trash in my neighborhood.” -Leon’tay

“I helped a first grader.” -Jayden

“I helped someone on the bus.” -Alonso

“We help Kindergarten students each day during recess.” -Akira, Monse, Nataly, Racheal, Nataly

Behind the Scenes

We LOVED watching Lex’s “Behind the Scenes” video. We had fun taking a peek into his life in the OTC community. We are jealous of the cafeteria. Students want to have all those options in our cafeteria. If we are ever in Chula Vista, we want to have lunch with Lex at the OTC. We enjoyed seeing the track and gym where Lex trains to be a Paralympic athlete. Students were shocked when he sat down to the play the piano. They thought that was so cool! We even looked up the OTC on Google Maps to see the satellite image.After watching Lex’s video, we became inspired to film our own “Behind the Scenes” videos of our school, B.T. Bullock Elementary.

Behind the Scenes of BTB

Our Classroom

BTB Cafeteria

BTB Playground

Live Chat with Lex

We welcomed Lex into our classroom community this month through our live chat. He graciously answered all our questions and left us anticipating for the next time we’ll chat. Students were all a buzz for the rest of the day (and the week and month). It was truly an inspiring morning. “It was the best day ever!”

 

 

Communities in our Curriculum

Once again, community month for Classroom Champions aligned with our units on the Thirteen Colonies and Ecosystems. These are the two largest community topics we study in our curriculums. We spent time reading and comparing the Thirteen Colonies to one another. We explored what life would have been like during the time of the colonies. Students would really miss their technology. In science, we made foldables to compare the characteristics of the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems (communities). We thought about “If you were an animal, where would you live?” and we discovered we would end up in different communities. Can animals participate in Classroom Champions too?

Standards

ELA: W.5.4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. SL.5.4 Report on a topic or text or present an opinion, sequencing ideas logically and using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.

Social Studies: 5.H.1.2 Summarize the aspects of colonial life in the thirteen colonies.

Science: 5.L.2 Understand the interdependence of plants and animals with their ecosystem.

Community 2016 #LexGillte

For November and December we were challenged to find ways to help out a community. As a class we brainstormed what different types of communities we have and picked two to help. For November we chose our soldiers. At McNair we have an annual candy for soldier drive, and last year we brought in 60lbs of candy for the soldiers. This year, with our community goal in mind, we brought in almost 140lbs of candy for our soldiers over seas.

For December, we wanted to help out needy families in our community. We rallied together to fill 6 food barrels totaling more than 1,200 items of food. We had done a food drive in previous years and only managed to fill one barrel, Lex really inspired us to step up and help those in need!!

Community

We had a great time helping out our community! We started our discussion by watching the mentor video Lex posted. Then we discussed ways we could help our families, our school community, and our city. We have three Classroom Champions teachers at our school and we decided to work together to host a food drive.
Each class contributed. The first grade class made the posters to encourage donations and the two fifth grade classrooms counted the number of donated cans in the classrooms each day. We had a school competition to encourage donations and we able to collect over 1,000 food items. It was a great success and my students were proud to help their community!

The rest of our month has been filled with excitement. We been preparing for the holidays and working hard in class, so my students were really excited to learn we would have a live chat with Lex! To make it even better, we received our Classroom Champions shirts just the day before. They were excited to wear their new shirts and talk with our mentor.

The students were proud to share our success with the food drive! They also learned more about Lex's training and the advice he had for our holiday break.

The months of November and December have been incredibly busy- but very productive. My students have learned a lot about their role in helping the community and have gotten great advice from our mentor. I'm really excited to continue our lessons in January!
        

It has been an exciting month for my Classroom Champions. We started by supporting our school's canned food drive. We talked about the need in our community for families who may not have enough food to eat during the holidays. Our part of the project was to make signs to hang up around campus to encourage the other students to bring in as many cans as possible.

The students were really excited to be a part of this project and our school ended up donating quite a bit of food to Second Harvest Food Bank. The classes that brought in the most food got to have a free dress day (the students usually wear uniforms).
The other exciting thing this month was video chatting with our awesome mentor Lex Gillette. My students enjoyed asking him questions about participating in the Olympics, training, everyday life, etc. He also told the students a great story about a time when he wanted to give up but kept on persevering. They really consider Lex to be their friend, they are benefitting so much from his mentorship. They also loved the shirts, stickers, pencils and folders from Classroom Champions and the Lex poster is now hanging proudly in our room.
 

JDH in our Community!

Community in Grade 6 & 7 

Where oh where did November go? I still cannot believe it is over and we are rushing closer and closer to Christmas Break! 

November brought many exciting things to our Grade 6 and 7 classes, including our first live chat with our mentor Kieran Block! 

Community is a big part of our classroom all year round, so coming up with ideas of how we can help our school and local community seemed like easy work for our kids! 

As part of Canada's 150th Birthday Celebration RBC has launched a campaign called #Make150Count. People tweet at RBC with this hashtags for ideas of how they could make $150 count in their community. Both classes came up with pitches for RBC and tweeted them out in early November. While we did not hear back from RBC it really got the students heads in the game for what's to come. We had so many lovely ideas from giving to the food bank, to buy and splitting wood for someone in need of heat this winter, to donating warm clothing to those who cannot afford it. 

During November we also celebrated the Week of Kindness where we celebrated all of the staff members in our fantastic school. Each student made a thank you card for a staff member and hand delivered it with a hug. It is easy to forget how important the people we see every day are to us! 

This past Monday we had our first live chat with Kieran! The kids were so excited to hear more about his life and to share information about us. We cannot wait to share more of what we are doing with Kieran as the year carries on. Including the essays and letter the grade 7's are writing about why Classroom Champions is such a valuable program! 

Finally, as we move into December the grade 6 and 7's are busy planning what we are going to do for our community before our break. We have plans to bake 150 cookies to hand deliver to the Long Term Care home just before Christmas! The grade 6's are also working hard every day at learning Silent Night on the Ukulele as well as the words to the song in both English and Arabic as a way to welcome our new classmates and their family members to our school community! Look forward to that video before Christmas - if I can keep my emotions in check long enough to video tape it!

 

November Update on Community

November Update on Community

November is already over! I hardly noticed because we were working so hard in Grade 5 on our Helping Our Community project! After we watched Jesse's video we wanted to learn a little bit more about what was special about our community, so we used the writing process to create paragraphs titled My Community. We learned all about the different things our peers love to do in our community like, going to concerts (yes we do have concerts all the way up here, usually by Inuit bands like Twin Flames, Jaji, and The Jerry Cans), playing hockey at the arena, playing outside, and going to the restaurant. We also wrote about the other things that are in our community like the nursing station, houses, the municipal building, and the Co-op. 

After we talked about what our community had we started to talk about what community members might need. We wanted to make sure that we did a service project that would be helpful to our community; some ideas just wouldn't work up here! We finally settled on a food drive. Since food is so expensive in Northern Canada, some families go without food, or with very little. 

We started our project by brain storming our Goal, and how to get the word out. 

After we decided on a goal we created a Goal tracker to have a visual of how close we were.

Our next step was to create posters, so everyone got a lesson in making posters in Word. 

Our next steps will be to collect the food and then bring it to the DYP for distribution! 

In the mean time we started another smaller community project. We will be going to the grade 3/4 class to teach them straw weaving. The kids have been practising all week to make sure they are experts when they start teaching!

We are loving community, and counting down the days till Christmas now!

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