How Was Your #Dotday?

September 15^th is an International celebration of creativity, courage, and collaboration. International Dot Day took our classroom by storm on Friday the 13^th 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 5^th 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!