Tag Archives: community

Be Square

Here’s a post about another team building activity we did the other day.  And boy, did it take some GRIT!  Some grit that we had to dig really deep for, too. 🙂

The basic premise of the game is that each person in the group has a folder with pieces of different squares.  In total, the group needs to end up with 5 equal-sized squares.  The catch?  No one can talk.  You can’t ask anyone else for pieces, but you can give pieces to other people in your group if you think they need them.

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At first, this was a really tricky task!  The biggest problem?  Everyone was trying to do it on their own!  Pretty much the opposite of how the game works!  You would not believe the sounds I heard during this activity–it’s too bad I didn’t take any video.  Most sounds were moans and groans as they tried to figure out what to do, except for from Table 6 (see above)–their group had “tweeting” or “chirping” sounds happening during this task.  I soon figured out that that was the sound of them digging deep to find their grit.  Whatever works, right?

However, I mentioned that some of us really struggled, and that was something that could be seen as well as heard.  Within the first few minutes, there were twisted-up “thinking” faces, frowns and furrowed brows.  One friend was even laying over the seat of his chair upside down.  Frustration abounded.  But nope–they could not and would not give up. 🙂

Eventually it was time for lunch, and so we left to chow–and left our game just as it was, planning to return after we’d had some time to breathe.  As I was sharing the story of our struggle with some friends at lunch, Mrs. Berger said something about needing to see things in another way.  This was genius!  It gave me an idea for how we could switch things up after we came back.

Once we were back in the room and ready to get started again, kiddos returned to their tables, but they had to sit at a DIFFERENT seat than where they were sitting before.  Groups got started again and slowly, but surely, I started to get hands raised (which was the sign that they had gotten it!). 🙂

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As we debriefed after we were finished, I asked each group what they thought it was that helped them the most.  Without fail, groups mentioned that seeing it from another angle helped them–then could see the puzzle from a different point-of-view and think in another way.  Thanks for the suggestion, Mrs. Berger–it’s just what we needed! 🙂

 

3 Things and 3 Friends

I have to start this post by fully disclosing that neither of the ideas I’m sharing today are mine. 🙂  Remember my FABULOUS teammates Genie and Rachael?  These ideas are theirs and I tried them in my room and they went really well.  Thank you for sharing, friends!

As I am sure you have figured out by now, building a strong community of learners is very important to me–as it is to many teachers.  So we spend the beginning weeks of school getting to know each other, both as learners and as people.  We laugh together, create together and hopefully start to build a trusting relationship that will help us as we learn together throughout the year.

One way I help foster these bonds is by going through an exercise called 3 Things (or at least it was called 3 Things this year–I have too many students to do it the original way of 5 Things as Mrs. Hong taught me!).  It’s pretty basic, but has been very much worth our time.  The conversations we’ve had around everyone’s 3 Things have been great and the inferring that happens during the exercise is great, too.

It’s pretty basic: each person brings in 3 things that tell us something about them and we have to guess (or infer) what those items mean.  I started by sharing my 3 things: a picture of Mickey Mouse, measuring cups and a Kirkwood School District pencil.  Everyone then has 3 minutes to talk in their 3 Friends groups (which I’ll explain in a minute 🙂 ) and decide what the items mean.  Every group shares their ideas with the class, I chart them, and then we hear the “real” answers from the spotlight person.  Easy peasy.  Here’s what my chart looked like:

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Now, honestly, the first two of mine were pretty obvious: Mickey Mouse is to represent my family’s love of Disney World and the time we spend in the Happiest Place on Earth.  I can’t really explain what it is about that place, it’s just that it’s become our home-away-from-home and has a special feeling.  Just being there is amazing.  But I digress…

My second item is measuring cups and represents my recent love of baking and creating things for my family, primarily my kids.  If you dig a little deeper there’s a story about how we’ve been learning about eating locally harvested “real food” and are trying to cut out processed food from our diet–this was the spark for my new baking hobby–but that was obviously not a story that kiddos inferred from my picture.

That last one is a pencil.  It represents a couple of different things.  First of all, and most glaringly it is my love of writing.  But I also picked this particular pencil (and a pencil instead of a pen) for two other reasons:  it represents the annoying trouble there has been in my room for YEARS with never being able to keep pencils sharpened (EVERY pencil sharpener I have ever tried has broken.  I think my room is cursed!), as well as the fact that Kirkwood is my home, and where I have always been a teacher.

Since I shared my 3 Things, we’ve randomly chosen two kiddos every day (a boy and a girl) to share their own 3 Things.  Kiddos have taken this very seriously, and with each group that goes, they’re getting better at picking tricky things that get us really thinking.  They’ve been really good!

Then the other simple but powerful thing we did was called 3 Friends (thanks for sharing, Ms. Turken!).  Again, it’s not very complicated: you and two other people get in a group and do a couple of simple things–make sure you know each others’ names and find out 3 things you have in common.  The groups then introduced their 3 new friends to us, and shared what they had in common.  We took a quick poll to see who else had those common interests, too.  Then we come back to these groups everyday in 3 Things, helping to solidify the connections we’re making.  I’m thinking that as we go on, we’ll create new 3 Friends groups periodically that have different goals or functions in our room.

What would you choose for your 3 Things?  Post your list here and we’ll see if we can figure you out!  Play along with us! 🙂

 

Book by Book…

Yesterday we talked about the journeys that readers take.   Today we talked about how readers can make little goals along the way to help the goals in their journey seem more attainable.

We talked with our elbow-partners about goals that they’ve made, and when we shared out from our conversations, we realized that we had made goals that fit into 3 basic categories: goals for at school during RW (like reading 30 pages before the end), goals for at home at night (like reading 2 hrs before bedtime or “scheduling” it for after dinner or before bed), and goals that span the whole week (like finishing a certain number of books each week).  It was a great conversation that helped us all better envision how to have (and keep) a growth mindset.

Then I was ready to give them a goal of my own.  It is a year-long goal, and is definitely a pretty big one: to read at least 40 books, in a variety of different genres.

Screen Shot 2013-09-06 at 8.47.27 PM(Remember how I read The Book Whisperer this summer?  This challenge and genre requirements came from there. 🙂 )

I put this slide up on the ActivBoard and waited for the reactions.  To my surprise (is it ok to say that?), no one freaked out.  No one cried, and no one seemed discouraged!  I was really expecting at least one person to say that this was an impossible challenge, deciding already that they were doomed to fail.  But beautifully, what happened instead were a variety of responses somewhere along a continuum of “only 40? I thought it would be more like 150!” to “on 40?  I know I’ll read more than that this year!”.   I loved it, too, when one sweet friend looked at me, slowing nodding and smiling, seemingly saying “I can do that, Mrs. Bearden! I don’t know how yet, but I know you’re going to help me.” 🙂  And YES, my friend, I will help you!

But then my favorite part happened.  My friend Brittany (remember her from that big pile of books yesterday?), who had been talking to Grace, looked at me and said, “Mrs. Bearden, you’re going to do this, too, right?  You’re going to read 40 books with us?”  I was a little surprised, because I was surprised that she asked.  But I was SO GLAD that she did.  It would have been one thing for me to say that I was going to join them–which I was planning on doing anyway–but it’s a completely different thing when it’s their idea.  Now it’s OUR challenge instead of just mine.  And we’re going to accomplish it together, book by book. 🙂

Our First Class Meeting!

If you don’t know about how we do Class Meetings around here, be sure to check out the previous posts Lessons in Democracy and Class Pet Petitions for a little background first….go ahead.  I’ll wait for you. 🙂

We had our first real class meeting this past Friday and it went really well!  I say “real” because the week before (our first Friday) I walked them through the process of 5th grade class meetings, to either remind or inform them of how we’d be doing them this year.

Here’s our chart after dots were added: Screen Shot 2013-09-03 at 7.28.13 PM

We had a busy week, huh?  The lists at the beginning of the year always seem to be a lot longer because we do many more short activities as we’re getting to know the classroom and each other, as opposed to longer projects as we move further into the year.  And for some reference, SRI is the Scholastic Reading Inventory and helps assess readers.  Students get their Lexile level from this assessment, which helps them as they choose books (which I guess is why so many kiddos gave this a blue dot–signifying that they learned alot from that activity).

I found it really interesting (and surprising, honestly) that so many kiddos chose Appletters as the topic to discuss and problem solve around.  And with that many red dots I was dying to find out their thinking about how we could fix it for next time.

After they shared their concerns, these were the things they mentioned that we could work on:

  • kiddos using really loud voices during the game
  • some just sitting (not participating or waiting for others to come to them)
  • not allowing others to join their words
  • leaving others out on purpose, or replacing their letters with other letters
  • only trying to make words with friends, instead of trying lots of options
  • people stepping on each other, running into each other or shoving as we move around the room

Then we were on to problem solving (we actually had a lunch break in between to do some thinking), and came up with some ideas on how we could improve our game the next time we played it:

  • aim at using a Level 1 or 2 voice (which at our school means whispers or soft voices), so even if we get a little louder we’ll still be at a reasonable volume
  • give kiddos time to think independently before we move together to build words
  • make a rule that you could add letters or rearrange them to make new words, but NOT remove letters once they are there
  • play in another part of our room, or try to use more space instead of clumping together
  • have a place for “odd” letters (like Z, X, Q, etc.) to go if you can’t build a word, then those letters try to build something.
  • I also suggested that I would add some other guidelines for what kinds of words they could build.

These were pretty good, and we were excited for the next time we played!

Little did they know that their next opportunity would come that afternoon!  The “rules” this time was that their words had to be at least 4 letters long, and could not be names (remember GIBY from last time?). We all agreed that the next time we were much improved.  Check out our words the second time around!

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Someone said this word was inspired by a book cover they were looking at just before we played our game–funny that they were actually able to find the letters to build it!

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Check out the way CAR turned into CRATES--a longer word with more friends involved! Success!

Check out the way CAR turned into CRATES–a longer word with more friends involved! Success!

 

All of the "odd" letters met at Table 4 to see what they could come up with...

All of the “odd” letters met at Table 4 to see what they could come up with…

 

...and many hands made for light work.

…and many hands made for light work.

 

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Definitely not an Appletters “fail” here–that’s a good word!

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Check this one out! Another one where someone (Owen!) was just looking at the letters and this came to him! Genius!

What a FABULOUS example about how a group of people with great ideas can change things for the better!  What a great start to the year, and an exciting precedent for class meetings to come. WAY TO GO, RM. 202!! YOU ROCK!

Appletters

Ok, so first of all, before Sunday, I didn’t even know this game existed.  Did you?

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I mean, I know about Bananagrams, and we had a TON of fun playing a variation of it last year at the beginning of the year.  So really, Appletters is just another version of Bananagrams (and there’s even Pairs of Pears, too)–really it’s just a fruit-shaped bag filled with letters.  But this one was cheaper. 🙂

So like with last year’s Bananagrams, we started by giving everyone a letter.  Then they had to find other friends and make words.  The first time around there are no rules (outside of the one that says you have to make words, hee hee), and we came up with these:

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So for the second round I added the guideline that the words had to be at least 4 letters:

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I wasn’t sure this one was actually a word, but then was informed that it’s a character from iCarly. I think next time we’ll change the rule about names.

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I like the story behind this one. It started as “bands” until we noticed that there were two friends with I and T who needed a group. Voila! BANDITS!

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I am hoping that this is a game we can come back to again and again this year.  I am excited to see how the words we make grow and change as we work with words and vocabulary throughout the year.  I’m thinking I might make it an option during Reader’s Workshop, too, as a word game.

Have you ever played Appletters?  What about Bananagrams?  How do you use them in your classroom? What other games do you play with words or vocabulary?

Finally! Time to Rest and Reflect….

I had forgotten how hard teaching is.  After so many days “off” this summer (while I could get on my soapbox about how teachers are not really off all summer, I’ll spare you the details.  For now. 🙂 ), we’re finally back into the school year.  Today was day 5.  And I am tired.  Exhausted. Sleepy. T. I. R. E. D.  Perhaps it comes from the fact that, even in 5th grade, you still have to do so much for your students this early in the year–mainly just since routines and procedures are not yet in place–or maybe it’s that I’m out of shape.  Either way, I’ve been ready for bed by 8:30 or 9 every night.  Granted, I haven’t actually GONE to bed that early because I’ve had work to do, but believe me, I was ready. 🙂

But by day 5, things are starting to settle down (at least a teeny bit), so I can stop to rest and reflect on how the first week (and then a day today) have gone.  And I’m happy to report that things have gone pretty well.  So far so good!

I mentioned in a post before school about how my team had come up with some great ideas for how to thoughtfully do our community building activities.  This turned out to be a genius move (if I do say so myself!) and I’ve loved how things have worked out thus far.  We even worked out the order together on a Google Doc (which has been a personal goal of mine).  It’s nice to know that even though we’re not trying to be copycat classrooms, we’re all doing similar things in a similar order.  Teams kinda work like that, you know. 🙂

While I would love to share EVERY MINUTE of what’s happened over the last 5 days, I don’t have time (nor energy) to do so–hopefully if you’re a parent in our room you have heard all the fabulous tales from your kiddo anyway!  What I will do, though, is share some highlights.  Then I will promise to eat my Wheaties and take Vitamin C so that I will not be so pooped next week and can instead update the blog more often. 🙂

HUMAN KNOT

IMG653One of the team building activities on our list was the Human Knot.  Basically, you “tie” yourselves together by holding hands across the circle, then you have to work together to “untie” yourselves into one big circle at the end.  We did this very early on, very shortly after we had all met each other, thinking (and hoping really!) that it would be hard.  We did pretty good for our first try, actually, and got two parts of the knot undone.  There was a pretty large tangle still left in the middle, though, that was ready to topple over at any moment.  We celebrated the way we worked together and let certain friends step up and lead, and vowed to do better next time.  I’m so excited to try this again after we’ve done some more community building, because I know they will do even better!

SAVING SAMMY!

I found an activity on Twitter the other day, posted by another #5thchat teacher, that I thought would be a great partner thing to try–Saving Sammy!  The basic idea is that you have to get a gummy worm (Sammy) into a gummy life saver (his life preserver) so that he doesn’t drown.  The only catch is that you can’t use your hands!  Instead you have two paperclips as tools.  I added in a step at the end for partnerships to write about how they figured out what to do and any advice they had for kiddos trying for the first time.  This went pretty well, and they definitely enjoyed it!

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SNACKS

If you read our first day post, then you are aware that we eat lunch around dinner time.  So on Friday I brought the snacks, which included cantaloupe from Terripin Farms CSA (to which I belong and LOVE!), as well as strawberries and raspberries.  These were from the grocery store, but were also tasty.  While I am not allowed to share like I would like to (because of school allergy rules), I do what I can.  I think there is something great about sharing a meal together, or in this case a snack.  Plus, we got to use the new table!  Bonus. And yummy! 🙂

More to come…

Even as recently today, we have had some FABULOUS conversations about grit, played Appleletters, done something called 3 Things and 3 Friends, and almost completed some rather involved work with multiple intelligences.  I hope to update you on those happenings soon!  Please come back soon to visit again and catch up on the great things going on in Rm. 202!

I Told You We Were Blogging, Right? :)

Really they’ve been blogging all year.  Only it’s been on our class blog.  A few short weeks ago now, though, our 5th graders got their own blogs!

There is a long story behind how I started down the road toward kid-blogging, and I posted about it here.  We did much of the same process this time, and it went equally as well with these kiddos as it did the first time around.  Only I have a little bit of  hunch that this year’s class will go even farther with their blogs.  Partly because we started earlier and so they’ll simply have more time, but also just because this class just seems to dig into their work with such eagerness and enthusiasm.  I think they’ve already written more posts on their own at this point.  They really think in terms of what is “blog worthy” as they go through their normal lives.  I love it when I go home and there are posts waiting for me in the inbox that tell the tales of all the great things that happened during the learning day.  And not because I told them to write about them, but because they wanted to write about them!  It’s great.

But I digress…

Here are some pictures of our first days on the blogging journey, which started with creating our paper blogs:

Some kiddos got inspiration by checking out last year’s blogs before they got started on their own.

After we had our blogs created, we learned how to comment.  And got to work practicing on post-its before we went into the “real” world.  I have to say how proud I am with how great they did, remembering to be positive, tell something they liked about the blog post, as well as ending with a question to keep the conversation going.

               

               

               

               

              

              

              

So needless to say, they are totally rocking this blogging thing!  If you haven’t had a chance to check us out, visit our student blogs to see what it looks like live! We would LOVE it if you left us a comment to tell us what you think!

Holy Redheads, Batman!

Ok, so I have to apologize in advance for the indulgence factor of this post.  It fits into the “just-a-slice-of-5th-grade-life” category.

First let me share a picture that we took today:

See the meaning of the title, now?  We’ve talked all year so far about how many red-headed girls we have in our class.  I mean, really, if you have red hair and are in 5th grade you’re in Rm. 202.  Which I think is great!  Look at those beautiful girls. 🙂

And don’t be sad if you’re not in this picture, friends!  Don’t worry–I’ll try to find ways to include everyone in this way.  Maybe the next picture I post will be of someone make silly faces or doing something random in the classroom.

Oh, and I just have one more question:  can you tell which one of us is NOT a natural redhead?  Hee hee. 🙂

Class Pet Petitions

I don’t know how long you’ve been reading, or how far back you’ve gone through the post archives, so I’m wondering if I’ve told you about class meetings yet?  I wrote about the big idea behind them here, and the story was pretty great.  This class is doing an amazing job with class meetings, too.  Each week, though, when we sit down together to reflect upon the week and talk over things we want to improve upon, there aren’t really any problems to solve.  Oh, come on.  No way, right?  No really–we had to change the last question on our meeting protocol to “What do you want to talk about?” rather than “What do we need to improve upon?” because of how well these kids work together, learn together and just generally follow the rules and procedures of our school.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re not perfect.  We do work things out together.  This week was an example of two kinds of issues to discuss.

 
Like class pet petitions, for instance.  Here is what the flipchart from this week’s class meeting:

So, see all those dots after “class pets petition?”  It meant that several people wanted to talk about that topic.  But again, it wasn’t because it was a problem.  They just wanted to talk about it.  They needed to decide whether or not it was a good idea for Ames to make us an origami class pet, and if so, what type of animal we’d want to have.  We decided that Ames (as the origami master of our class) would narrow the list down to four of his best creatures, and we’d vote on the one we liked best out of those four.  Then we’ll chat about it again next week.

Ok, so there did end up being a concern they did want to try to work out, and it was related to recess.  A question was posed about what to do when you try to play with people and they tell you you can’t.  We had a great conversation about strategies to try, words we could use and how it felt when someone told you you couldn’t be a part of the group.  The idea of “popular” kids was brought up, and the concern was raised that there are some people in our grade who won’t play with certain kids because they’re friends with certain other people who are considered weird or different.  It hurt my heart as I heard them talk about what was going on outside on the playground, and we decided that it might mean we needed a grander conversation.  We agreed that we would do what we could to support each other outside–like paying attention to when people are alone and inviting them to play, or standing up for our classmates if we see or hear something mean being done to them–but we agreed that this might be a topic that would be better discussed with our whole grade level.  So I have “homework” to coordinate a 5th grade recess conversation in the next few days.  This was definitely a problem worth tackling, and one that we want to see solved.

 

Don’t Steal the Struggle

I’m not even sure who said it,  but I know I first heard talk of it this summer when I was working with other teachers in my district.

 
First a little background: In light of the new Common Core State Standards, which are changing the expectations for teachers and students, our school district is reweaving our curriculum to match up with CCSS.  The best part of this whole deal is that teachers are at the heart of the work.  We spent four really intense days this summer learning and writing together, and then all this year a smaller group of us will continue that really great thinking to complete the documents for English/Language Arts (ELA) and Math.

Ok, so during our work this summer, a phrase was floating around that said: “Don’t steal the struggle.”  From the second I heard it, I knew it was something I’d be on board with. It’s actually something I’ve always felt really strongly about as an educator, but now I had better words for how to describe it–both for myself and to my families.

Then I had a situation within my own life happen last week that really highlighted the importance of this phrase for me.  And I’ll warn you ahead of time, that it’s an example I share as the “what not to do in this situation.”  I’m taking a class right now, and had an assignment due on Wednesday for the discussion forum for class.  I, unfortunately, had waited until late to do it, and so was in a little bit of a time crunch.  Last week was nuts at school with lots of meetings and conferences on Thursday night, so I had a lot on my mind (i.e. I was a little stressed out already!).

I sat for close to an hour drafting my answer to the discussion question (which was related to whether or not there is a paradigm shift in education from information acquisition to knowledge creation in American education), and was ready to post it.  And then–yes, you guessed it–when I hit POST, I got a weird ACCESS DENIED error message and everything I had worked on was gone.  Gone.  And no, I had not saved along the way.

So obviously there are probably other lessons to learn here besides the one I’m going to tell you, but this next part was the one I shared with my class related to struggles.   Unfortunately, my first reaction after that little bump in the road was to cry.  It’s kind of how I roll.  When I am dealing with something stressful, first I cry, then I write (usually in my own Writer’s Notebook, so I can figure out my feelings) and then I can figure out a way to deal with said frustration.  So here I cried.  Then I wrote–which was some rambling email to my teacher about what had happened and how I hoped she’d show a little grace when she graded my discussion post this week–and then I was able to think about what I should do next.  Pretty much I had two choices:  1) I could just quit, and not turn in a discussion answer this week (which would have several negative consequences) or 2) I could start over.  Well, needless to say, I chose option #2, and reluctantly started over with my answer.  Luckily, I remembered more of it than I first thought I would, and honestly I think the second version was actually a little better.

Ok, so what’s the connection to my classroom?  Well, go back to the “don’t steal the struggle” phrase from earlier.  The big idea there is that as an educator, I want to focus on not “rescuing” my students when things are hard.  Whether it’s in learning or something social or any other kind of problem they might have, it’s not in my students’ best interest if I swoop in and save the day every time they struggle.  I only teach them that things should always be easy, and that only an adult can solve problems for them.  That struggle is bad and that I’ll make it all better and fix it for them.

But of course that’s not true.  Some struggle is a good thing.  It’s during those feelings of disequilibrium, “pain” so to speak, when students are forced to figure things out for themselves.  To solve problems and use what they know to figure out what to do next.  And my students would tell you that they know that’s a really important thing to know how to do.  We had a discussion about this the other day and they had smart words about the topic.  They agreed that they wanted a chance to figure things out on their own first, knowing that I would support them as needed, but that I wanted them to try something first.  They knew that this was important because I’m not always going to be there.  Some day they’ll grow up will have to be able to know how to do that alone.  And several even mentioned the pride that comes with figuring out an answer for themselves.

My story was a picture of both what I hoped they didn’t do (just cry), but also what I hoped they would learn to do in a hard situation–figure out what to do to solve the problem.  Not quit.  Persevere.

So my new motto is Don’t Steal the Struggle.  It’s going to hang in my room for all to see, and to hold me accountable.  My kids understand it, and I think it’s vastly important as I help grow these learners into confident, capable citizens of tomorrow.  And like I tell them everyday, hard is good.  Hard is when we learn.