Giving an Audience to an Amazing Group of Students
At the end of the activity each child was left with a page filled with positive words about themselves. Words like, friends, and many, many others. We talked about how it felt to get these messages about how they were seen by others and the kids said it made them feel special, warm and fuzzy inside, and happy to read the words.
As we recognize today Red Cross Day of Pink in support of taking a stand against bullying, we will continue to use our positive, uplifting support of each other in our class and our school.
As part of our learning about the First Nations Circle of Courage, we have been learning about Mastery, which is the identification of things that we are good at and things that we know so well that we could teach others.
As a class we identified and learned about what the word meant. We talked about the fact that everyone has something that they are great at! As a group, we brainstormed a list of different things that people could be good at:
Then we talked about ways that we could present and teach our skills to the class, using different method, props, etc.
Each child was encouraged to complete a planning sheet to help them identify what skill they were going to teach, what props/items they could use to share the information and what they could say to help others understand what they were Masters at.
The results were phenomenal. I had planned for each child to speak for 3 5 minutes each. Most of the students managed to do 10 12 minutes minimum of presenting and speaking to their peers. The passion and enthusiasm that they showed was proof of what happens when you allow children to about things that they are interested in and excited about. I exchanged tweets with him to get more information and was eager to pose the problem to my students.
Each child was then given 5 index cards and had to write one thing on each cars that they thought were the most important things that would need to be included in the building of the community. The students then got into partners and tried to organize, group, and categorize their cards. Those partners joined another set of students and did the same thing. The groups continued combining and sorting cards:
Afterwards, the cards were put into the iCardSort app where they could be discussed, further categorizing was done, and the students volunteered to take on different responsibilities cheap nfl jerseys to create our community.
The students met in their partners or groups and decided how they would create their contribution. Plans were made to bring items from home and supplies were provided in the classroom. The students were all engaged in their learning and all were active participants. The final result was remarkable! We spent 1/2 an hour playing in our community before it became more recycling. Seuss birthday would have been on March 2 so we spent this short week doing activities related to his work.
Monday was Cat in the Hat Day! The kids all wore red and were appointed as either 1 or 2 for the day. Mrs. Crawford was Teacher of All Things. Unfortunately, we were so incredibly busy that we forgot to take a group photo! We did celebrate the end of the day with Thing Cupcakes:
Tuesday was Fox in Socks Day! We learned about rhyming words and tongue twisters. We had all kinds of crazy socks worn!
Wednesday was The Lorax Day. We talked about being kind to the Earth and we recycled our big community project. (I follow up with another blog about that activity!) We all became Loraxes: Speakers for the Trees:
It would have been Bob Marley 69th birthday this year. We acknowledged the day with a classroom Beach Day. We watched Marley video, One Love, then learned about what an was when we read the book called Love, written by Marley daughter. We talked about his messages of acceptance and friendship and then set to making our own messages. You can see them here:
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We worked on our balance in gym with practicing our and finished the day with a beach treat Popsicles! while listening to a Robert Munsch book, Sandcastle Contest.
Then, as if today wasn awesome enough, we celebrated Hot Chocolate Day with our friends from Mme Potter class. We enjoyed hot chocolate with a toppings table where the kids got to customize their own drinks. We watched a short video about why hot chocolate cools in cold weather, like in the Arctic. Or Saskatchewan. We also wrote about our hot chocolate preferences and graphed them for a data analysis activity for math.
The Cupcake Analogy is one that was shared with me by our Educational Consultant, Frankie Pelletier, based on a similar visual created by Jenel Markwart, a grade 6/7 teacher at cole Centennial School. It helps the students understand how their achievement is reflected in our Grade Two curricular outcomes. The version in the photo above, the one that is hanging in our classroom, is one that I created written at a primary/elementary level to help my students truly understand it.
This visual helps the children understand what they need to be able to do to get an ET/4, ME/3, PR/2, BE/1 in our assessment system. You will have noticed in Gradebook that when you see your child marks that I will mark to specific outcomes as opposed to giving percentages or individual assignment marks. Since we will be referring to this analogy I thought it would be helpful to have a similar language at school and at home. If you would like to see the documents with the cupcake stage descriptors, you can find those HERE.