Healthy Living Month in Akulivik

I can not believe April is over! It was such a short month for us. We had barely finished Leadership when our Spring Break started, and I was gone for two weeks (one for break and one to attend the CC conference!). Getting out of Akulivik takes so much work and planning, and there were some weather troubles, so we started Healthy living month last Wednesday! Now all the kids are gone for Culture Week, so our Healthy Living and We are Champions months will be very combined. We have only 4 weeks left of class!!!!!

Following up on Leadership month we finally completed our challenge! The kids worked hard to think of things they could improve to be better leaders. They also drew themselves as the type of leader they want to be (many want to be team captains!), and Malisa wants to help feed people so that they won't be hungry. I'm honoured to share my time with such great thinkers and leaders, and I love it when they surprise me like that!

Then we started healthy living month. We watched our new video with two amazing mentors and started a conversation about healthy living. I was so proud when the kids made connections to something we did months ago, but stays on our wall!

We explored some games from Ask.Listen.Learn. and started our first lesson from the site! The kids learned about the brain, and how alcohol affects both adults and kids brains.

Next up I am sending home the challenge that our mentors gave us. Parents will receive a letter explaining the challenge and asking them to send in photos of them and their kids accomplishing it! The challenge was for the students to find a healthy recipe and cook it with their family, or to get outside and get active with their family. I cannot wait to see them accomplish this challenge and get their family involved!

We will also be tracking our healthy activities for a whole week. 

I am excited to finish off the year with a bang, and am looking forward to our next video chat!

All the best from Akulivik!

Perseverance

This post is late as I have had to truly persevere with my class through events that teens should not have to face in their young lives.  It has been a great month of learning and sharing ideas about how to persevere when we are faced with adversity.  January was definitely the right month for my class to work through many issues with a focus upon perseverance.  We faced many challenges and had to work together and learn how to continue forward with our heads high and a focus upon continuing on.  

Over the Christmas Break one of my students tried twice to commit suicide and was hospitalized for several days.  I only learned of these events upon my return to class on January 9th.  During the second week of  classes she attempted again and was under suicide watch at our local hospital for a week.  I was allowed to visit with her several times and had many deep conversations.  Perseverance was one of the topics that we discussed while I sat on the side of her hospital bed with a security guard positioned just outside the door.  During one of my visits I brought my tablet and together we watched Jesse Cockney's video. I want to thank Jesse for giving me one more tool that I could use to open up a conversation with my student.  She identifies with Jesse as she also belongs to the first nations community.  

My class also had to deal with the expulsion of another classmate due to a violent incident which caused severe physical injuries to others.  These events happened on the last day of school before our Christmas Break and so had to be dealt with at the school level and board level upon our return to school in January.  Again, perseverance was key in helping my class work through many issues.  

As you can imagine, the life lessons that are a part of Classroom Champions are extremely important and relevant to the young people in today's classrooms.  I am extremely grateful that such a program exists, as it reinforces to our students that they do matter.  Having an Olympic  mentor who takes the time to send videos made just for them and to video chat is a priceless gift. And yes, sometimes teachers also need a lesson and help with perseverance.

I would like to share with you a folder with some of the ideas about perseverance that my students shared with me.  I have not included the more personal reflections due to privacy issues and the events that we are currently working through together..  

Here are some perseverance reflections. 

Perseverance

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.

 

 

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!

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!

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

Fair Play – October

This month went by so fast! We are not finished with fair play yet, because we only had two weeks. At our school the students spent the past week learning all about their Inuit culture out on the land and all over town. I cannot wait to have them back, hear what they did and continue our lesson on fair play.

 (I will add a “rap up” post after we finish!)

We started out the month talking about fair play in our morning meeting. We discussed what it was and how we could show it in our lives.

Then we watched Jesse’s video on fair play, and got a sneak peak at the ski room. We followed that up by watching a few videos of different ways athletes showed fair play on the field.

I talked about fair play vocabulary and we described what fair play looked and sounded like.

Then we made an anchor chart to help us remember.

 We talked about ways that we could show fair play, and we took the challenge to show fair play in gym class. After gym we wrote about ways that we showed fair play (not everyone is finished yet).

 Next up is some readers theatre that shows people

not playing fair. We will re-write them to show fair play and then read them out to the class.

Afterwards we will choose a short moment in our script that really shows fair play, and create a tableau of that moment which we will take a photo of to make posters teaching other students in our school how to play fair.

As you can see lots planned! We should finish in the first week of November so that we can move on to community. Stay posted for more (better) photos of our fair play!

Grade 5 – Tukisiniarvik School, Akulivik Quebec

Welcome to the Journey and Goal Setting in Akulivik!

September Over View

We had so much fun with August/Septembers focuses! To start out the year for “Welcome to the Journey” we made hand prints and wrote “I have what it takes!” on top. Then we each signed our handprints. We started learning about our athlete with puzzle clues (an idea I found on our amazing community!). We split into groups and had races to see which group could decipher the puzzle first, and then we researched some new words to understand the clue. After each clue we added to our giant KWL chart about our athlete, which we will continue to revisit throughout the year, and we added a little to our athlete discovery board.

After we learned that our athlete was Jesse Cockney we watched the first video. The kids were so excited to hear him say my name and our village! One of our “Wonders” on our chart was the Olympics so we started to research about the Winter Olympics. We learned all about the symbol of the Olympics and made our own with tissue paper.

We did a “Write the room” activity all about the sports in the Winter Olympics. We watched some videos including the amazing highlights from the Sochi Olympics and we read all about the Olympics with some comprehension books.

Then September started and we went full force into “Goal Setting!” We talked about what goals were, then we watched Jesse’s goal setting video. The kids were captivated! We re-watched the video while filling out a fill in the blank sheet that I designed to get the important parts.

We then began writing our SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed. The students created water colour backgrounds for their mountains, and cut out a mountain silhouette to glue on top. They then wrote their steps for their goal on small pieces of paper and glued it onto the mountain.

 

Throughout these two months we also learned about what a mentor is, and created a video entitle “A Mentor is…” which I will be posting soon!

We had a crazy, busy, super fun start to the year, and the kids are so proud of everything they have accomplished!

Thanks to Classroom Champions and Jesse Cockney!