Friendship

 This month we focused on friendship. It was a lot of fun to help my students get to know each other better. We started the month by watching Lex's video. He discussed the power of friendship and my students agreed that friendships can help us get through hard times.

In the video, Lex challenged my students to get to know people better. In order to build our classroom community, I set up 'interviews' between pairs of my students. They asked each other three questions:

1. If you could have lunch with any famous person who would it be and why?
2. What do you like to do outside of school?
3. What is your favorite school subject and why?

Students were paired with someone in the class they didn't know very well. They started by asking each other the interview questions. After they discussed the interview questions students continued to get to know each other by asking their own questions. Students learned that they had a lot in common, even if they didn't usually talk or play together. It was a great class building exercise and I hope students made some new friends!

  

Perseverance

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.

  

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!
        

Fair Play

We started our discussion about fair play by watching Lex's video. The students were really engaged and enjoyed learning about the rules for long jump. They also thought it was interesting Lex has to wear a blindfold. After watching the video we had a short discussion about what fair play means to them. They said fair play means not cheating, following the rules, and being a good sport (win or lose).

I wanted to challenge the students to think about situations they might encounter on the playground, so I provided the following situation: "You are playing kickball and someone kicks it really far. They run around all the bases and run to home. As they are running home your team throws the ball to home plate. There is a close play at home plate and an argument develops: your team thinks the kicker is out, but her team thinks the kicker was safe. How can you solve this problem?" One solution that is popular at our school is using rock, paper, scissors to determine the winner. This is a conflict resolution strategy taught to all students at our school from the Playworks Program. It's a really effective and simple strategy! The students agreed that solving the problem this way would be the best solution, so they could focus on playing more kickball!

We finished our lesson with a two part activity. Part one was creating a skit to show how students can play fair. Each student wrote their own skit (which allowed everyone the chance to think about how they can play fair. In their skits student showed how to resolve conflicts, how to go to an adult for help, and how to encourage others to play fair. After writing the skits, students drew a picture that showed someone playing fair.

Standard:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.5.1
Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information.

September Monthly Summary

September 2016- Goal Setting

   Objectives: Students will set a SMART goal for reading and another goal about a topic of their choice.

Standards: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.5.6

With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others.

My class started by discussing the importance of setting goals. We then spent time talking about the importance of reading. We use the Guided Reading Level system at my school, so students are aware of their current reading level (a letter A-Z). Students then spent time setting goals for reading. We also talked about how setting short term goals will help them reach their end of the year reading goal.

To follow up on this lesson, we watched the video from our mentor, Lex. My students were really impressed and inspired by his determination. To set more goals, we utilized our digital portfolios. Students created a webpage to share their classwork, information about themselves, and their goals. Students set long term and short term goals on a variety of topics (including becoming better at sports, video games, and school. The great part about students being able to write their goals on the digital portfolios is that they can share the goals with their families. We know the importance of having families involved in reaching goals, so I am excited about this piece.

To create the digital portfolios we used Google Sites. Thanks to Allison Smith for sharing a guide to help my class set these up!

                                                       

                           

September Goal Setting with Lex Gillete

September : Goal Setting

We began by watching a youtube video called Audri's Rube Goldberg Monster Trap. The link is here:
https://youtu.be/0uDDEEHDf1Y?list=PLh6K5ZpyE1u4iLRSkzWufpe497FwAxC1m. In the video a boy has built a complex set of reactions that ultimately end up with a monster getting trapped. The important part of the video is that he predicts it will only work a couple times out of about 20 tries. When it does not work he does not get upset, he just keeps trying and when it does finally work he is so excited. I thought it was important to front load some of these ideas for my students so that when they watched Lex's video they would already be thinking about persistence as a necessary part of reaching our goals.
My students were so incredibly excited to watch Lex's goal setting video after watching his introductory video. They already feel like he is their friend. I wish he could have heard them cheering when he said our class's name! Lex did such a great job of explaining goal setting in a way that the students could understand it. After the video we had a discussion about what sorts of long term goals my students have and how we can do lots of things along the way to meet our big, long term goals. At the end of the lesson the students wrote and drew their long term goals. We hung them up in the classroom and my intention is to keep them up all year and repeatedly refer to them. I want to keep the discussion going all year about what short term goals they can work towards now to reach their long term goals. For example, if they want to be a teacher, they need to learn how to read and write in First Grade so that they can graduate elementary then high school and then go to college. I can already see how participating in Classroom Champions is affecting our classroom climate and helping the students become even more excited about school and learning.