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| Students beginning graffiti project sums up how I'm feeling about my class during the first week of school. |
The school year is off to a very good start. In a large part, the new year has been enriched by Zaretta Hammond's good words in her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. I'm applying many of the strategies she describes in the book with success, the kind of success that is making the classroom more inviting, collaborative, and dynamic.
The children are offering all kinds of support as they come up with multiple new ways to manage the days for success, ideas about fair share of hoki stools, apt storage of technology, easier paths to the busses, ways of celebrating good work, and new table groups have all been offered by students who are now taking the lead with their ideas to make our classroom a successful place to learn.
As with all learning plans, there's been a good amount of revision to better match the learning to the students in front of me. Eager plans to dive right into the numerical expression unit have been thwarted by a need and interest to learn more about the divisibility rules--learning that will well support all units of study ahead, and learning that will culminate with a wonderful factor captor tournament next Friday morning.
A team-graffiti lesson introduced students to graffiti art, the issue of legal vs illegal graffiti, The Red Can graffiti festival at the the Cheyenne River Reservation, the history of the Lakota Sioux people including the massacre at Wounded Knee, and a deeper focus on teamwork with my favorite teamwork video about a group of young Indonesian soccer players. In a sense, we took a world/cultural tour as we engaged in this group activity.
The week included music, tech, physical education, and library classes as well as lots of time for reading and writing too.
Next week, we'll finish up a few projects we started, study the divisibility rules, read a lot, write, and study more art, tech, music, and physical education too. A good week ahead.
