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!
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