Classroom Community & Culture

Imagining Possibilities: Repurposing & Not a Box

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This week, the focus of my lessons with my K-2 students was our first STEM class principle — Imagine Possibilities. My goal in structuring these lessons was getting students producing lots of possible ideas and then choosing one (or more) to explore.

My three second grade classes completed a simple repurposing activity, which also tied in with our yearlong focus on resources. We reviewed the terms reduce, reuse, recycle and then learned the new word repurpose. Students then got to choose an item from a bin containing all sorts of boxes, containers, and other miscellany that I’d been diverting from my recycling bin for a few weeks. Their excitement about getting to repurpose grew as the week went on — when I was walking groups of students to my classroom, the kiddos in the front of the line would ask, “Are we going to be making things like the other kids did?” My hope is that their interest in repurposing will spill over into their home lives, as it’s such a simple (and cost-effective) way to get kids making and engineering.

Here’s a look of some of their final products — I was blown away by their creativity!


Meanwhile, with kindergarten, I tackled “Imagining Possibilities” with a favorite lesson framed around Antoinette Portis’ Not a Box. I gave each of my kindergarten students half a cereal box (I have over 50 kindergarteners and my stock of boxes didn’t run deep enough!) and encouraged them to use it to create their own “Not-a-Boxes.”

Again, students created a wide range of responses to this task. And, my goodness, did they have a great time making them!

 

I’m excited to see what else my students will create as we continue to practice and build a culture of imagining possibilities!

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“Constructing” Relationships: Share & Build

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In my new role, I’ve got to learn about 400 names (insert teacher in a cold sweat just thinking about it!), which means that I’ve been starting off all of my first classes with name games. Because I’m teaching STEM, I came up with this simple little idea that achieves the dual purposes of having students introduce themselves and working together to create something.

The activity, which I’m calling Share & Build, is super simple. I put Jenga blocks into a bucket. Students passed the bucket around the circle, each taking out a block. I modeled the process by going first and sharing my name, something I like to do, and then placing my block down on a table or the floor (whichever makes the most sense for visibility.) I then chose a student to repeat the process. That student selected the next participant, until we had gone through the whole class and had created something together.

My second graders loved this activity and were highly interested in seeing how their classmates would choose to add their blocks to our classroom creation. I found it interesting to observe the way that, as the top photo shows, some classes ended up working to create a neat, orderly design, while others were more focused in looking for novel placements of the blocks. We definitely had some toppling action, which provided a good first opportunity to discuss the importance of mistakes and experimentation in STEM.

If you’re considering trying out this idea, I think that, with a smallish class, having students have two blocks each could make this activity even more engaging.

STEM Class is All About IDEAS!

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I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past week or so thinking about how I’m going to go about establishing norms and expectations with so many (25!) different sections of learners. When I’ve worked with just one classroom of students, I’ve tended to devote most of our first week together to discussions about what we want our classroom to be like, what rights everyone in the room should be guaranteed, and what responsibilities everyone has to help make sure that those rights are upheld.

While I don’t want to move completely away from those democratic conversations, because I’ll be working with students for only 30-35 sessions a year (and don’t have wall space for 25 different sets of rights and responsibilities!), I’ve decided to define a set of expectations that will articulate to all students, Pre-K to 8th grade, the type of mindset that they’ll need to engage most fully in our STEM classroom.

The result of this thinking is a set of qualities and dispositions that I hope to encourage in my scientists and an acronym that I believe is perfect for STEM class — IDEAS. 
Imagine Possibilities
Dig Into Mistakes
Embrace Challenges
Ask Questions
Share and Show Kindness

In our first classes, I plan to introduce these qualities, one or two at a time,  and then engage the learners in a discussion and an accompanying activity for each one. Hopefully this will bring a balance of meaningful discussion about key STEM (and general learning) qualities while opening up plenty of space for student participation in  shaping what our classroom will be like.

If you’re interested in getting a copy of these posters for your own STEM students, you can find them in my TeachersPayTeachers store.
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A note about graphics in this file:
The blue question mark — Q — is my original artwork and my classroom mascot.
Gear borders available for purchase & download from Elementary Inquiry on TPT.
Critical Thinking Clipart from Teacher Karma on TPT.

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Making Morning Meeting Meaningful

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I am finally back up and running at my usual pace after developing walking pneumonia a few weeks ago. I don’t get sick very often, but this particular condition had me feeling fatigued and off for weeks. The experience of missing some school and then coming home from school completely exhausted illuminated the importance of self-care — something that I (and probably most teachers) are often guilty of sacrificing in order to put our students first.

Today I’m excited to share that I’ve finally completed a months-long project that I’ve been plugging away at a little bit at a time. Since I started teaching, Morning Meeting has been a cornerstone of my classroom practice. I developed routines for giving every student the opportunity to share, started incorporating singing, and built in cooperative games and activities and eventually, started adding activities about character.

Last year, I decided to try structuring the cooperative portion of the Morning Meeting around social justice topics. My teacher training took place in a social justice-focused program and I have always sought to integrate issues of equity and diversity into my classroom, but found that they were often feeling like “add-ons” to my other thematic units. I realized that I could utilize our whole-class Morning Meeting as an opportunity to dive in and grapple with some real-world issues. By connecting these topics to Morning Meeting, I could also ensure that these topics entered the classroom conversation on a daily basis, rather just time-to-time when certain topics or activities fit into our other learning. Thus, the idea for a “Meaningful Morning Meeting Mini-lesson” curriculum was born.

This year, I’m running my Morning Meetings with the following structure. Screen Shot 2017-10-29 at 3.03.20 PM

The changes that I’ve made to Morning Meeting are going well!  I’m noticing a new level of engagement during Morning Meeting and I am pleased that we’re not just playing games or doing unconnected activities during this time. (Please do not take this as an insult to classroom games, as I  love games and fun activities and use them as breaks throughout our day.) It is exciting to be building towards the completion of meaningful projects and getting these important topics into our classroom each day.

Thus far, I’ve taught my students the lessons in the first two units of the Meaningful Morning Meeting Mini-Lessons (MMMM) curriculum. I’m about to start the media literacy unit and am excited that one of my big passions will finally be brought into the classroom in a more sustained way.

I finally completed unit nine of the curriculum and all of these units are now available on my TPT store. I’ve tried to cover a wide range of topics that connect to social justice and have incorporated many different types of activities into the lessons, including reflection activities, discussions, art projects, poetry writing, and reading response activities. In the later units, students work on larger projects which require them to synthesize their learning and to create products and practice activism.

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I am excited about these units and am eager to share these activities with like-minded educators who want to bring meaningful issues into their classrooms.

The Simple Move That Has Transformed Classroom Afternoons

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My kids, probably like all students, have times when transitions are smooth, simple, and stress-free and times when transitions can be slippery and stressful. This year, my students had been struggling with the transition back to the classroom after their time at “specials” — PE, art, music, etc. When my students return to the classroom after their specials, we still have almost two hours of learning time. But, day after day, regardless of the transition strategies I was trying, we were losing time getting back into learning activities. Not only that, but their focus flagged for the remainder of the afternoon, leading to a lot of (unnecessary) redirection and frustration on my part.

With spring finally beginning to show itself here in New England, I decided to try a new strategy for navigating this difficult time of the day for my students. I’ve long wanted to incorporate more physical activity in my day, but struggled to find times to fit it in without carving into time I hold sacred for other activities. Thus, a time when we were losing time anyway became a logical place to try out a few minutes of physical activity.

So, for the past two weeks, I’ve been experimenting with having my students return to the room after specials and quickly collect their coats. Once everyone is dressed, I’ve been taking my students on 5-12 minute walks around the schoolyard and parking lot (and, around the school building itself during subzero March weather and inclement weather…).

The changes in my students at this time have been remarkable. Now they rush eagerly back to the classroom, rather than dragging their feet down the hall. They also challenge each other to get ready as quickly as possible, as they know that maximizes the time that we have for our walks. Once we get outside, their joy is palpable — they can be noisy and move their bodies freely, they can chat with a neighbor and splash in a puddle. While our walks have been limited thus far to blacktop due to especially soggy conditions as the snow finally begins to recede, as things dry up, I’m looking forward to being able to bring them onto the wooded trails behind our school, exposing them to incidental learning along the way.

The best part is, that after just this short amount of time, my students are more settled, happy, and respectful for the remainder of the afternoon. It’s hard not to be in a better mood after getting to take in some fresh air and sunshine outside — I’m sure its positive influence on me is another reason these walks have been so successful. Needless to say, we have significantly increased our productivity in those final two hours — no pulling teeth required.