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!

The Future is Now: Leaders in Nunavik

The Future is Now

This month went by so fast! Wow! We started out the month going over vocab that we would need for Jesse's video. We watched it, and talked about what he meant, and how it related to us. We also made some posters to cheer Jesse on in his race!

Then we started working on our challenge. This was a big one because we really needed to understand what qualities we thought a leader should have before we tried to figure out how we could be better leaders (disclaimer: we are not finished yet!!) 

We started out by watching some videos (Go Kid President!) about the qualities other people thought leaders should have. We also looked at some quotes from everyday leaders about what a leader is. 

Then we did a team building activity. We talked about how leaders are a part of their team, not at the top, but in the middle, and we made teams and did a building challenge. The students had to build a basketball tower out of newspaper and tape (and  few magazines when we ran out) that was at least 50 cm tall.

Then we had a hiatus from school and participated in our second Culture Week of the year. The kids learned how to skin a fox, cut snow blocks, make ice fishing rods, and sew mittens. 

This week we looked at the difference between bosses and leaders. We started off  by looking at this picture:

We talked about why the bottom picture was a leader and the top a boss, and how all the people felt with their job. 

 I printed off a number of actions that a leader or a boss would do. We worked hard to find the phrases that were opposites like show and tell (can you guess which is the leadership quality?) Then we made a chart (that was too small-my bad) that showed the differences between the two.

So the next step is to finish Jesse's challenge to write don three things that we can improve on to be better leaders. I am excited to do this with my students because I want to be a better leader too! I will post a follow up. 

The future is now, and these guys are already leaders in their community. I love to remind them that they are mentors and leaders every day, and everything they do either makes them a better leader, or not. These kids are going to go far and do great things! 

Making New Friends

What a wild month it has been! At the beginning of the month, just as we started talking about friendship, we found out that one of our science fair teams was going to the Regional Nunavik Science Fair in Inukjuak. This took place the 13^th to the 16^th of February. Here is a peek at the proud team explaining their project to a judge.

These guys were so excited to get to go, and we had crazy fun time taking plane rides, learning more about science and presentations, and eating Beluga (a generous gift from our host family).

 Then we got back and had a blizzard, and then we finally got a chance to sit down and watch Jesse’s new video on friendship. The kids were so excited to see a new video after so long and Jesse gave us a great challenge. Find someone in your class that you do not hang out with and learn two things you have in common, and two things that are unique about each of you. I was so proud of the students as they worked on this. They worked very hard on this challenge and were excited to learn some similarities and differences about people that they thought they already knew!

We followed up this activity by watching a read aloud of Chesters Way . This is one of my favourite stories about friendship. We had a great discussion about friends that are different from us, and why that might be a good thing. 

Then came Pink Shirt Day. Because many of my students do not have pink shirts and it is not easy or cheap to get t-shirts up here, we decided to look at Pink Shirt Day a little differently. Instead of showing support by wearing pink we showed support by acknowledging the kind things that we do for each other every day and by highlighting them. We wrote out "Tickets" every time someone did something kind for us. The tickets included the name of the giver and receiver and what kindness was shown. We then put them in a jar and at the end of the day we pulled out a few to read. 

We also designed our own Pink Shirts.

We still have a little bit of friendship to cover. We will be talking about how to be a good friend throughout March while we tackle Leadership! Cannot wait to see how this class can show Leadership in their school (more than they have already!) Thank you Jesse Cockney for a great lesson on making new friends and great qualities to look for in them!

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!

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

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!