@skypeclassroom visit with @MarkC_Author

Hearing real stories of #growthmindset in action is amazing. My students loved how he shared that he had multiple failures on his path to success and I loved the idea that failure just means you haven't found your right path yet...

He also shared some AMAZING tips about self-publishing through Amazon. After his book began to sell, publishers & agents began to seek him out instead of getting lots of rejections when he was seeking out publishers & agents. When you do what you love, people will find you!

http://markcheverton.com/share-your-minecraft-images/

My students have been determined to write a 24 page story so that they can put it on amazon and order a real copy of it. This is such a great thing that every teacher should be utilizing!

#Easter Egg Baby Project

One of my students saw an episode of "Everyone Hates Chris" where he had to take care of an egg baby and asked if we could do it in class. YES!

Some kids in the 4/5 class loved the idea and wanted to do it too and it spread... That's the awesome thing about ideas, a good idea is contagious. 

They started preparing by making cots for their babies, which was a good idea because since the class is two sets of twins, a lot of the students decided that they wanted to have twin baby eggs. One of the boys even wanted quadruplets.

Reading a story on Epic! to his Quadruplets

The twins in their bunkbed

They even brought their babies to Language class with us & the teacher humored them by asking them "Shoori Oozhi?" (What their name was) 

It was fun as we named their babies, we used babble.com to look up what certain names mean. One of our student's name meant "from the big town" lol

Keep Calm & Carry On..

It started when one of my students found a: Keep Calm & Vote for Hunter gif on the internet and wanted to print it out for his future campaign. (Apparently there is dissent against current class the current class president) Its interesting because this is apparently a World War II era meme and we are currently reading "Number the Stars" 

I found a link where they could generate their own version of the meme. (http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/) A student made these posters for her Easter Egg Babies: 

And a get well card for our classmate, who got med-evaced after a snow-go accident...

And when they found out that you could make a graphic of anything. One of my students made this, which was inspired by our skype with Author: Mark Cheverton. 

They are 21st Century Kids and this is a 21st century classroom... I'm glad it gets them reading, writing, and designing! 

6 week countdown...

I'm not counting the days till summer, instead I'm counting down the days I have left in the classroom. I had mentioned before that I was ready to leave the classroom and now, I have a clearer picture of what the next year will be like...

We started our sunflower seeds from our penpals in Kansas this week... And now, Looking forward to fun Earth Day with Lots of Outdoor activities, teaching the students about Thailand, having both a Star Wars Day & Cinco de Mayo celebration in the same week, just ordered my caterpillars from Insect Lore... and looking forward to the school's yearly Culture Week.

So the time that I do have left, I want to make the most of. One thing that I tried was a movie day at the end of the week. This was a positive reward for the students for having a good attitude during testing. We watched Moana and I put the subtitles on. It was a joy to watch them read & sing the movie. Even the boys got quite into the singing with the hand raising! They were actually reading: "What does excuse mean?" "I didn't know design was spelled like that" "It says squealing" (I put the hearing impaired captions on)

That song "How far will I go" will forever remind me of these guys...

6 weeks left.. I'm going to miss it. 

#K12ArtChat

Have @francisvallejo ‏as a guest speaker via @skypeclassroom! He was amazing!!

He shared with the students how he went from a little kid who liked to draw into someone who gets paid to create illustrations for books, draw comics, and cartoons for magazines & newspaper. Plus he teaches a class to college students in Art! 

He offered them advise to draw every day. Draw things from real life, draw things from imagination, draw silly things.... just keep drawing!

At the end, he put up a picture of Louis Armstrong and drew along side the students! He told them to have fun with it and their drawings turned out fantastic! 

#RJLeagueChat

TEACHABLE MOMENT ALERT: As I went to pick up the students from lunch today, one of the girls mentioned that one of the boys was being mean to her at lunch.

When they came in, I had them all sit in a circle on the carpet. I asked the girl to tell her side of the story, then I had the boy explain his side of the story. It seemed to be part of a bigger issue, which was great because it was a good time to problem-solve!

Like most cafeterias, ours can be loud. There are two rows of 3 tables. Apparently the boys had been sitting on the table that was closest to the window (farthest away from the noisiest part of the room) and the girls had been sitting on the inside table closest to the other grades. One of the girls had attempted to commandeer that side and had put her water-bottle down to mark her spot before getting in line.  The boys had ignored it and got there first from the line since they had lined up to get their food first. Then they had some verbal exchanges.

After everyone had gotten a chance to speak. I asked them for some solutions: 

1. Boys and Girls could switch sides (either on a daily, weekly, or random through wheel of destiny or  whoever the helper of the day was)
2. They could both sit on the far table it the boys on one side and the girls on the other
3. They could have divide a line down the half of the table with the boys sitting on the far right and girls on far left
4. Someone also proposed that they share the table & sit boy/girl/boy/girl but that ideas was immediately vetoes. 

At first it seemed at an impasse, then the boys said they were ok with switching sides daily as long as they could go first. The girls agreed. 

I told them that if this didn't end up working out, we could talk about it again to find another solution. That's the great thing about working towards a solution, if it doesn't work, just try something else!

Testing Time...

As I mentioned before our school worried about attendance because of testing running the same week as spring carnival. So, all student who were here on time got to the gym at 8:30, pick out a fun prize (balloons, snakes, whoopee cushions...)

And 3-6 lined up for a "do-or-die" free-throw contest where they each took one shot. If you made it you went to the end of the line, if you didn't you sat down.... 

By the end of round 1, there were 5 students left. 3 were my 3rd graders (and the only girl!) One of the 6th graders ended up winning, but it was still fun for all. 

Afterwards, they got to play kickball for an hour. They say that exercising is great because it turns on the regions of your brain. They certainly got a workout and were ready to go. 

The 2nd graders had written sweet notes to wish them all well during the testing, so we stopped at their bulletin board to read them all. 

Bags of Lucky Charms for Good Luck :)