Bridge Building Workshop
Building Bridges with Mr. Caron was a HUGE hit with the students! A big thank you goes out to the parents and grandparents that were able to join us! Students learned about the different shapes and structures within bridges that make them strong.
Strengths and Stretches
A couple of weeks ago, the students and I worked through an activity inspired by my time with Shelley Moore. Shelley Moore is a well known speaker that advocates for inclusive education. One of the topics that she discussed at my first session with her was the idea of having students identifying strengths and stretches of themselves individually or of their class team. Strengths are things that they see that the class does well together and stretches are things that they feel that the class needs to improve on. We discussed these concepts over a couple of days and then I had students complete a worksheet that allowed them to voice their ideas for our strengths and stretches as a class. On the back of the worksheet, I had the students write down the things that they need to learn. I compiled the lists that were thoughtfully completed by all of the students and inputted them into a Google Sheets document so that I could create graphs to share with the students. The students were amazed with the results! Shelley Moore had discussed the ownership that the students take over the results of this activity and she was right! The discussion that followed me presenting the results was amazingly thoughtful and mindful! I was so proud of the students! The discussion was focused around problem solving as a team and taking ownership for the growth that we all wanted to see for our class family. If you'd like to see the data and charts, click on the link below.
To sum it up, the students all agreed that our class is too chatty...something I've been trying to deal with all year. They were quick to make the connection between the fact that they feel that they are too chatty but that they also all agree that they need quiet to learn...and that this is a big problem. It was amazing how much ownership they took over this issue considering the number of times that I have mentioned the same issue to them in the past.
We discussed different ideas for solving this problem. They broke into small groups to brainstorm a few ideas. We came back into a large group and discussed each groups' ideas. I gave the students some more time to process the discussions and we came back together to fine tune our ideas after a couple of days. We came up with a new checkmark system...students were supposed to tell you about it last week. This is how it works:
If a student is being disruptive during quiet class time, they get a verbal warning and their name is written on the board. If they are disruptive again, they get a checkmark beside their name. Each checkmark counts as one minute of time that they owe me, from recess, gym or some other fun activity. They will also be writing the number of checkmarks that they receive in their agendas at the end of the day so that you can see it. The students all agreed that this was a fair plan. It has already drastically reduced the amount of disruptive noise during quiet class time and the students all seem proud of this improvement. This was my first time doing an activity like this and I was super proud to share 3Cs work at the last session with Shelley Moore this past Monday. If you have any questions about this process or our checkmark plan, please let me know.
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