Perseverance - This is How We Do it

I love perseverance! In fact my students know my favourite saying is,

 "What happens when we do hard things? We get smarter!" 

At the beginning of the year they used to complain that work was "too hard," but they slowly realized that if they tried their best, then the work was just right. They also know that if they think it is too hard, they probably just need a refresher on how to do it, or they need a little help. No one ever said you had to persevere without help!

This month the students and I have really dug into perseverance. This is a topic that really hits close to home for me because I teach very far away from my family and fiancé. Sometimes it can be really hard to imagine getting through two months without seeing them at all. I used this to talk to my students about what perseverance can look like. We talked about what perseverance meant, and different ways we each persevered in our classroom. We wrote out examples, and non-examples of perseverance.

 When we watched Jesse's video he told us to look back at our goals and see how far we had come. We realized that this was difficult for us because many of the students didn't really believe that they could reach the goals they had written down. They were so far in the future that they could not combine it with their everyday reality. So we decided we would try again to look at Goals in a new way. We created a classroom goal.

Since we were working on multiplication we decided to make our goal around that. I found a multiplication quiz online and we made it our goal to have everyone finish it in under 2 minutes. I made a chart so that we could track our progress, and we set to work.

This goal is definitely taking some perseverance! The first day we had students finishing in between 3 and 12 minutes. We time ourselves every day and now we have two people who can do it in under 2 minutes and everyone can do it in under 5. Even though January is almost over we will not be stopping! I am so looking forward to the day that each of them finish in under 2 minutes! I wish you could see the proud look on their faces when they show me that they finished 20 seconds faster than yesterday. It is making me choke up while I write this!

Math has not been the only place that we have been persevering. Our school is also having a science fair, and even though we are the youngest class involved my kids are hard at work trying to go to regionals! Our question is "How should we wash our hands?"Check out these amazing scientists!

As you can see, the hand washer is blindfolded so that they cannot try to scrub off the paint they see. Since we can't see germs we used this method to test our hypothesis.

My students show perseverance every single day, some just by showing up to school. They have a lot of challenges to overcome, but they are up to it. Cannot wait to start friendship and to tell you the results of our science fair!

All the best! GR 5 E!

Goal Setting With +Arianne Jones (Take 2)

Here is the second of three videos showcasing the students as they read their goals to +Arianne Jones.

We had a few complications but mostly we had fun.  Thanks for the goal setting challenge Arianne. We have completed our Fair Play Skits but I want to be able to put them together as a video before posting.  They will be posted by the end of the week. Then we will be starting our Community unit.

Setting Goals with +Arianne Jones

Most “impossible” goals can be met simply by writing them down, believing in them, and then going full speed ahead as if they were routine.

-       by Don Lancaster

Goal setting is easy for teachers but difficult for eight year olds.  Teachers want their students to be successful: therefore, they have many goals in mind for each student in their class. The truth is, these goals have little meaning unless students understand them and make them their own. 

Athlete Reveal

Our athlete mentor, Arianne Jones, challenged the students in our class to select a personal goal and a class goal, to work on, throughout her year of mentorship.  This is a great activity for the starting our year together in grade three.  As a teacher, my classroom goal focuses on building a classroom community that encourages students to work together to help each other.  Understanding student interests provides me with necessary information for layering in lessons that promote a sense of belonging.

Arianne gave us some challenges - Arianne's Challenges

The students were excited to hear from their mentor. They sat upright, focusing on her message and marvelling that they were listening to a lesson, from an Olympic athlete, designed for them.  Such wonderful engagement!

Once again, my appreciation for “Classroom Champions” grew enormously. I felt so grateful for Arianne’s mentorship. I have mentored a few beginning teachers throughout my career and I understand how much time and effort is involved the mentoring process. I appreciate that an Olympic athlete would share her precious time, with my students, to encourage their success.

In the discussion that followed, most students understood how long term and short term goals were different yet supported each other.  A few students needed help to select short term goals that matched their long term goal.  In one case the student could not differentiate long term from short term goals, despite lengthy discussion.  This was a good insight for me because it confirmed my guess that his home environment doesn’t support this type of conversation.  I knew I had my work cut out for me!

Here is one example of Student Goals  More to follow as they are completed.

At this point, conversation switched to classroom goals.  The class quickly decided they wanted to improve their reading skills.  Each student agreed to work hard to move up three reading levels by the end of the school year.  Unfortunately, when asked to select short term goals, they could only identify “practice reading for 20 minutes each night” as a strategy to improve.

Perfect!  What a great opportunity for me to layer in lessons about reading with good accuracy, fluency and comprehension.  I know how critical it is to look at student background knowledge before building lessons.  It looks like I have started with a blank slate!  Suffice it to say, we will be learning a lot about what it takes to read proficiently as the year progresses.   We will be busy identifying efficient strategies and using daily practice to improve our reading skills.  You will see below that this goal will fit in very nicely with the grade three Alberta Language Arts Curriculum.  It is a happy fit for the year.

Before I sign off, let me emphasize that mentors have significant, powerful, positive impact. Mentors provide direction.  Our goal setting will influence choices we make for life-long learning. It will direct our daily choices and with reflection throughout the year, students will learn to make necessary changes as they fulfill or alter their goals.  Arianne’s challenge will set many big dreams in motion and direct the students in my class to make powerful, positive life choices.    

Who aims at excellence will be above mediocrity, who aims at mediocrity will fall short of it.

-       Burmese saying

Curriculum links:

Alberta Health Curriculum:

Students will use resources effectively to manage and explore life roles and career opportunities and challenges.

L-3.4 identify the steps of the goal-setting process, and apply these components to short-term personal goals

Alberta Language Arts Curriculum:

General Outcome 1 (Gr. 3)

Students will listen, speak, read, write, view and represent to explore thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences.

1.1         Discover and Explore

Express ideas and develop understanding

• connect prior knowledge and personal experiences with new ideas and information in oral, print and other media texts

• explain understanding of new concepts in own words

• explore ideas and feelings by asking questions, talking to others and referring to oral, print and other media texts

Experiment with language and forms

• choose appropriate forms of oral, print and other media texts for communicating and sharing ideas with others

Express preferences

• choose and share a variety of oral, print and other media texts in areas of particular interest

Set goals

• discuss areas of personal accomplishment as readers, writers and illustrators

General Outcome 2 (Gr. 3)

Students will listen, speak, read, write, view and represent to comprehend and respond personally and critically to oral, print and other media texts.

2.1         Use Strategies and Cues

Use prior knowledge

• share ideas developed through interests, experiences and discussion that are related to new ideas and information

• identify the different ways in which oral, print and other media texts, such as stories, textbooks, letters, pictionaries and junior dictionaries, are organized, and use them to construct and confirm meaning

Use comprehension strategies

• use grammatical knowledge to predict words and sentence structures when reading narrative and expository materials

• apply a variety of strategies, such as setting a purpose, confirming predictions, making inferences and drawing conclusions

• identify the main idea or topic and supporting details in simple narrative and expository passages

• extend sight vocabulary to include predictable phrases and words related to language use

• read silently with increasing confidence and accuracy

• monitor and confirm meaning by rereading when necessary, and by applying knowledge of pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and graphophonic cueing systems

Use textual cues

• use headings, paragraphs, punctuation and quotation marks to assist with constructing and confirming meaning

• attend to and use knowledge of capitalization, commas in a series, question marks, exclamation marks and quotation marks to read accurately, fluently and with comprehension during oral and silent reading

Use phonics and structural analysis

• apply phonic rules and generalizations competently and confidently to read unfamiliar words in context

• apply word analysis strategies to segment words into parts or syllables, when reading unfamiliar words in context

• associate sounds with an increasing number of vowel combinations, consonant blends and digraphs, and letter clusters to read unfamiliar words in context

Use references

• put words in alphabetical order by first and second letter 

• use pictionaries, junior dictionaries and spell-check functions to confirm the spellings or locate the meanings of unfamiliar words in oral, print and other media texts

General Outcome 4 (Gr. 3)

Students will listen, speak, read, write, view and represent to enhance the clarity and artistry of communication.

4.3         Present and Share

Present information

• present ideas and information on a topic, using a pre-established plan

Enhance presentation

•use print and non-print aids to illustrate ideas and information in oral, print and other media texts

Use effective oral and visual communication

• speak or present oral readings with fluency, rhythm, pace, and with appropriate intonation to emphasize key ideas

Demonstrate attentive listening and viewing

• rephrase, restate and explain the meaning of oral and visual presentations

• identify and set purposes for listening and viewing

Jumping Into Goal Setting

We began the month by watching Lex compete in Rio. We watched him strive to reach his goal of gold. Although, he did not meet his goal, he did come home with a silver medal. What a rush of emotions and perseverance! This showed us if you work hard you can reach your goals. We followed up Rio with Lex’s goal setting video. He was so creative with his message. The weights on the sled made since to the students when it came to writing their short term and long term goals.

 

 

Lex’s Challenge

Lex challenged us to write one long term goal and three short term goals. Most students set their goals on college or careers. They used some of Lex’s ideas when it came to their short term goals; completing homework, studying for tests, passing elementary, middle, and high school. We talked about what it means to write a SMART goal. We helped one another decide if the goals were measurable. Two long term goals that really touched me were “I want to be a better reader.” and “I want to get a good paying job.” (This comes from a student with little money at home.) Since Lex is a Track and Field athlete, we wrote our goals on track shoes. Long term goals were written on the shoe, while the short term goals were written on the wing of the shoe. They are on our long jump bulletin board outside our classroom.

 

 

Usually my students are shy and do not want to share their ideas with the class. This was far from the truth when it came to sharing their goals with Lex. Almost every student wanted to film their goals so Lex knows what they are striving towards. Listen as students share their long term and short term goals with Lex.

Jumping Into Goal Setting Part 1

Jumping Into Goal Setting Part 2

Goal Setting Extras

We are a Leader In Me school and Habit #2 Begin With the End in Mind is all about goal setting. In addition to the goals we wrote for Lex, we have written quarterly and yearly academic goals. These are kept in our Leadership Notebooks. We will be tracking data all year to see our progress towards these goals. We have also written a reading, math, and science class goal called WIGS (Wildly Important Goals). We use “From X to Y by when” to help us write measurable goals. We are also an AVID school and one piece we focus on is weekly goal setting in our agendas; academic or personal. Here are some of our recent weekly goals.

To learn more about our goals, visit our Classroom Champions Weebly page.

Standards

ELA: RI.5.3 Explain the relationships or interactions between two or more individuals, events, ideas. W.5.2 Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.

5.MEH.1 Apply positive stress management strategies. (goal setting)