Friday, September 20, 2019

The Bothering Box: A Way to Build a Positive Classroom Culture for Students


Running a student led classroom can mean that sometimes the best laid plans for the school day fall by the wayside. Prioritizing what is important when building relationships with individual students and a classroom community can often pause the academic day. Our ELA block got cut short this past week due to a note that was left in our bothering box. A student happened to mention he or she felt excluded from a few of the other students in our classroom.

At the start of the school year I observed classmates gravitating towards other students from a previous classroom, sports, or other after school activities. The exclusion was not intentional, but the student’s feelings became the priority for me. If the student wanted me to talk to him or her, he or she needed to sign his or her note left in the bothering box. If he or she wanted me to be aware of a bother happening in his or her life, he or she could drop the bother in the box and walk away. There was no name on this bothering box slip.

This one note drove the class meeting we had instead of working on vocabulary. Discussing what it meant to have an inclusive classroom was our topic for our class meeting. I wanted to show students what you put the box does get addressed, building trust between students and teacher.

I started the discussion asking what inclusion of others meant. Students had a range of valid ideas. We also discussed when you try to include someone, how to handle when the other person wants to be alone. This is a reality for our students. I dove into an analogy that students could relate to. I shared that when you do not pay attention to your surroundings and do not give another person a good chance you might miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from someone new. This is similar in their world to not giving a book a good chance. They could miss the opportunity to go on an adventure, learning something new, or disappear into a world so different than their own.

To build a collaborative and inclusive culture I surprised students by breaking them up into random groups to play indoor recess games. We had Connect Four, Headbandz, Jenga, Chutes and Ladders, Uno, and Guess Who going on all at the same time. I heard a lot of laughter and conversation happening between students who had not really spoken to each other yet this school year.



In these moments we all flourish as a classroom community. We took a break from our academic day to play and have fun with each other. This experience helped our class be ready the rest of the week to take on challenges together. I even noticed different partnerships forming and students sitting near new friends. We, as educators, need to take more cues from our students. I will forever be grateful for the bothering box that has helped me delve into the social emotional needs of our classroom community. The next note left in the bothering box was this experience made a student think about the time he or she had to end a friendship. That will be a conversation for next week!



Friday, September 13, 2019

How Was Your #Dotday?


September 15th is an International celebration of creativity, courage, and collaboration. International Dot Day took our classroom by storm on Friday the 13th to celebrate and honor students where they are at. It gave us an opportunity to chat about growth mindset, failing forward, and trying new things.  

We kicked off our celebration with a Dot Day Breakout EDU. Creativity and drawing paper got locked in a box, and students had to decipher clues to open up several locks. Sadly, no group was able to successfully open the box, but they all tried and worked together. A few groups had one lock left when the 45 minutes was up!



Our next Dot Day activity happened over Twitter. The town neighboring ours happened to post they were looking for some cross-district collaboration, so I tweeted back our class would love to connect with another 5th grade class. Voila! We had a match within mere seconds. Thanks to Karen Winsper for helping make the connection and to Jenifer Carline for her quick planning with me. Together we created an activity for our students. Children worked on a collaborative dot drawing in Google slides! Our students created their dot of interests on the left side while Ms. Carline’s students took over the right side of the dot. Students loved watching other students in another town create something with them! We are going to meet our new friends face to face in a Google hangout on Monday, continuing on the Dot Day festivities.



Dot Day continued after lunch with a Dot Day interactive activity! We learned about famous failures and discussed the following question: If a person continues to try to achieve something even after they have not achieved something the first or second time around, is their lack of achievement failure? Why or Why not? We used padlet as a tool to answer this question, and some of our new friends from Norton surprised us by also answering the question! We heard Peter Reynold’s story, The Dot, discussing growth mindset.



Students shared that they appreciated our Dot Day extravaganza during our closing circle. I am thrilled our students were engaged in creative activities today that called for courage and collaboration!



GSuite Keeps You On Your Toes: Adding or Creating in Google Classroom


This morning when students were creating vision boards in Google classroom I introduced them to the Mark as Done feature. Getting students into the routine to mark their work complete in an online setting takes time, as it is a new to them. I tell them it is like putting their physical assignments in a hand in bin.

Today when I showed each individual student how to mark as done as he or she completed his or her work, I noticed something new about Google classroom. I was excited because apparently Google classroom changed how students can add their own work to assignments in Google classroom.

There is now a large add or create button, giving students the opportunity to add something to their assignments or create something in an assignment.



Upon clicking the button we noticed there were lots of options to add or create in an assignment in Google classroom. 




This feature is more user friendly than what was there previously and easy to explain to students. I always tell learners of GSuite you never know when something will change on you! GSuite keeps us on our toes and helps us teach students how to be flexible and fluid with their thinking when things look differently.