sharpening the saw using rockets!
Celebration is one of the keys to the Leader in Me program. After working all week on becoming a community. The children were given the opportunity to enjoy an afternoon of excitement as their teachers launched their hard work into the atmosphere.
Rocket Day from Daniel Hodge on Vimeo.
Beginning with the end in mind/synergizeThe children conducted science experiments today exploring different types of chemical reactions. I love group work when it comes to science experiments because there are so many of the 7 Habits that come forward to the table.
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Synergizing over twitter
Over the last couple of weeks, some of the children in our class have been participating in the Global Blogging Challenge. The thing that has been the most interesting has been the use of Twitter by the teachers to solicit comments.
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aNOTHER RENDITION OF "hAPPY"
Artist Day left us with a lot of time to film in between presentations. We loved the opportunity to Sharpen the Saw before Spring Break.
sYNERGIZING LEADS TO GROUP LEARNING
The students practiced summarizing text today by reading through different topics in the Social Studies curriculum that we haven't discussed before the CRCT. We then compiled the summaries into a Prezi for them to share over the weekend.
Famous American Day
Habit 5: SEEK FIRST TO UNDERSTAND, THEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD
Today's Famous American Day was a success. I loved all of the monuments and the children's costumes, but my favorite part of the entire day was the look on the younger children's faces as they shared in the experience. Half way through the morning I changed the lens I was looking through. I stopped evaluating my students monuments and costumes and started watching the children's interactions with the younger students. It was priceless.
Using the 7 habits while creating our zoos
Our zoo project this year turned out to be not only a place for the children to show what they had learned about organisms, but it was also a great place to practice the 7 Habits.
- Begin with the End in Mind - The children in our classroom can work forever on an assignment. If you give them a project they will get to work on it and then time gets away from them. Someone will go off on a tangent and start independently researching some obscure element from the task. Meanwhile, three or four children will gather around another student who has chosen a different way to represent what they know. Now here is the crazy thing....they aren't "technically" doing anything wrong. They are still learning. As a matter of fact, they are learning so much that they cannot get the project that is in front of them completed. Does this sound familiar? I know, as an educator this really is a great problem to have. When I introduced our Zoo Project, I had to be very specific about the time that the children were going to have to complete this. We drew a table up on the board that the children copied onto their rubrics. The table defined the minutes that they had each day to work on the project. I told them there would be no late submissions and no taking it home to work on after school. This project was as much a test of concentration and focus as it was a glimpse into their learning.
- Put First things First - The next place that the 7 Habits needed to be discussed was in the design and layout of the projects. As I mentioned before, the children had a very specific amount of time to work on these projects. After about a day or so into the work I was noticing that they were doing a wonderful job planning the layout of their zoos as well as drawing and pasting the different plants and animals that would be housed there. The only problem was that this was really only one of the seven different elements that their zoos would be graded on. At this time I had the children refer to their rubric and try to figure out if they were focusing on the most important elements of their projects. We established that we had to "Put First things First" and prioritize the information over the design. Design and visuals are always important, but in the end it is the information that we are looking for on large scale projects like this.
"Mr. Hodge, the Founding Fathers must have begun with the end in mind, because they made sure that the Constitution could be amended."
-Sumanth