Instruction

Student Entrepreneurs

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A playground bullying monitor.
A stepstool that doubles as a storage solution.
Shoes that help you reach things.
A vending machine with healthy choices.
A programmable learning ball.
A “lost” button for students.
A learning-focused divider.
A redesigned water fountain
Friendship badges
An unflippable chair

For our first unit with the 7th & 8th graders, all of the specialists in my building have crafted projects that encourage students to take positive social risks. In STEM class, my project took the from of students coming up with an idea for an invention or product that would help a target user somewhere in the age range of Pre-K to Grade 4.

This project challenged teams of students to identify a meaningful problem that children encounter, develop a viable solution that addresses that problem, create a prototype of the idea, produce a slide deck aimed at persuading an audience to support their product, and presenting their product in a “Shark Tank” style pitch. Oh — and they had only 6 days to complete all of these tasks! It was certainly a heavy lift, but my students more than rose to the occasion.

After having five classes of 7th and 8th graders complete this project, I was blown away by their engagement, passion, and creativity. They have displayed a keen ability to put their fingers on challenges faced by younger students and their products have attempted to help students with problems including making friends, reaching or using things not designed with children of their size in mind, avoiding getting lost, losing things, staying focused and motivated in class, helping when they experience bullying, and encouraging them make healthy food choices at school.

The biggest takeaway for me in this project has been the magical results of allowing students voice and choice in their work. While I provided a frame that included specific “must haves” and a target audience, the assignment left plenty of room for students to develop something that mattered to them. While there was some variance in total effort, all but a tiny handful of my 70+ students clearly cared deeply about their projects and showed determination and perseverance in bringing their ideas to fruition in their prototypes and slide decks. The diversity in the resulting projects also created a lot of “buzz” and excitement in the classroom, as students were also curious about the work being completed by other groups.

The amount of spontaneous exploration and learning that happened due to this project also impressed me — I had groups engage in experimentation with LEDs and circuits, structural integrity when working with cardboard, sewing, programming, working with a saw, and a host of other skills. I am excited to continue to look for ways to allow learning to unfold authentically as it did in this project; my students’ work confirmed what research tells us — that immediately applying skills learned “just in time” leads to more meaningful and durable knowledge-construction.

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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!

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.

A Hive of Activity

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My Curious Questioners have been stretching their scientific reasoning muscles over the past week and a half. This impromptu bee and wasp unit has brought me so much joy as an educator — my students are engaged, curious, and making rich connections between their learning and the real world.

To ground this inquiry project in real-life experiences, I started our study of bees and wasps by having students write and draw about what they remembered from the encounter with the swarm of angry insects. Their work, on the 8th day of 2nd grade, really impressed me! It was particularly interesting to observe the way that some students automatically gravitated towards making predictions about what it was that stung us. When introducing the task, I explained how scientists try to remember details that would help them later on as they try to make sense of an experience. I expected students to write things like, “they were yellow and black,” or “they came out of the ground,” which I did get, but many students went further and made a hypothesis.

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After capturing their recollections of the event, the students got divided into four groups, each assigned to examine a suspected stinging insect. I set up four stations in the room — one about the life cycles of stinging insects, one about the anatomy of stinging insects, one that had students compare bees and wasps, and a final station with me that involved reading a nonfiction article about their insect.

As students rotated through the stations and developed their background knowledge, spontaneous scientific thinking and evidence-collection erupted. “I know what it was! Only yellow jackets nest in the ground.” My burgeoning scientists impressed me with their abilities to stay focused on the question at hand and to seek genuine evidence to support their hypothesis — one student was adamant that we re-watch a video 3 times to ensure she could get the screenshot that showed a yellow jacket nest in the ground. “See?!” she excitedly exclaimed.

Yesterday, my student groups shared their completed posters about their stinging insect. I subdivided each group into 4 roles (love a class size of 16!), so that each student would have a particular focus area — appearance, behavior, nests, or interesting facts. Their posters exceeded my expectations in terms of focused, relevant facts and specificity of detail in their drawings of their insect.

Tomorrow they’ll tackle the last part of this inquiry project — choosing which insect they now believe stung us and defending their choice with the evidence they’ve learned along the way. I can’t wait to see their work!

Serendipitous Mayhem

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Untitled 2.pngThe part of my revised curriculum that I’d most been looking forward to was Nature Study. Our first few lessons went swimmingly — students wrote and drew pictures in their notebooks of their observations, they were noticing unusual plants, and there was a keen interest amongst the class in getting to explore lots of different outdoor spaces around our school.

On Thursday afternoon, we went out on a cleared trail for Nature Study. Students were working on a 5 senses observation. We’d been out for almost all of the 20 minutes I’d allotted when, suddenly, this scene emerged: clipboards being thrown in the air, bloodcurdling screams breaking the serenity of the woods, and my 16 second graders scrambling back towards the school.

Yep, probably the worst case scenario — one of my Curious Questioners stepped on a yellow jacket nest, sending a swarm of angry wasps after us. Half of my students got stung at least once and one student began to have a reaction to the stings. (Fortunately, I somehow avoided being stung — that would made things far worse, as I have severe reactions to stings of any kind.) In short, utter mayhem reigned as I tried to ensure that students who had been stung got taken care of and had their parents notified against a backdrop of extremely over-excited and frightened 7-and 8-year olds.

Everyone was okay and things had leveled off by the time Friday arrived. In fact, by the end of the day, many students were citing “the wasp incident” as their favorite part of the week. Additionally, many of our questions of the week were inspired by wasps — a popular one was, “Why do they sting so hard?”

After the students left on Friday, I let out such a sigh of relief. The stress of the past couple of days finally washed away and now we could move on. But then, an idea nagged at the back of my mind — what could be a more clear example of a “teachable moment” than this episode? An opportunity to engage my students in meaningful inquiry about a topic in which they had a vested interest had come right up and “stung” me.

So, scrap the lesson plans! I spent the majority of yesterday designing an inquiry unit around the question, “What stung us?” I’d used the word “wasp” to describe the incident when talking about it with my students, but this word doesn’t pinpoint the species of stinging insect that attacked us (yellow jackets). So, I haven’t answered the question for them, leaving it wide open for exploration.

Tomorrow, when my students arrive at school, they’ll be assigned to a group that will be researching one of four possible stinging candidates — honeybees, hornets, yellow jackets, and paper wasps. I’ve created readings and some other bee-related centers that students will rotate through, learning about their assigned insect, but — most importantly — looking for evidence that might help determine whether or not their species is the culprit.

After groups complete their readings in a small group, they’ll work together to create a collaborative poster highlights facts about their insect’s appearance, nesting habits, and behaviors. Each group will share their findings with the class (and with families during our community meeting this Friday) and students will have to synthesize the information to create a scientific case for which insect they believe attacked our class.

I can’t wait to see them working like real scientists on this inquiry task! While I do wish that we hadn’t disturbed those yellow jackets, I am excited that something meaningful and likely memorable can come out of the chaos.

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