Trying New Things

Other than the end of the school year, the week leading up to winter break (which, ironically, is the end of the calendar year) is probably the most antsy week for students...and teachers. So many things to look forward to: trying to finish up units before the students leave for a week and forget everything (not that they are really internalizing too much to begin with); trying to keep every possible blind in the classroom closed for the fear that a student might notice through the slit between the edge of the window and the blind that IT'S SNOWING (and every other student in the room must know about it at that precise moment because none of them have EVER seen snow); reminding the students that yes, you need to wear your snow pants if you want to play in the snow; and, the topper, planning a classroom celebration for the students to send them off prior to a (hopefully) relaxing and much-needed break for everyone.

So, with the craziness that is already happening, why not throw in a little more, try something new, and change things up a little bit? In social studies, the students were learning about landform regions of the United States, and we followed it up by learning about the Native Americans who lived in these regions. Mr. Daniels, the new third grade teacher (you saw him last week in that viral video I posted in my blog), and I were chatting about this upcoming week and doing some planning, and we thought it would be fun to combine our classrooms to do the students' Native American projects together. The students are going to work in groups of 4 (2 from each room), choose a Native American culture group to focus on, do a little more research to add onto what we have already done in class, and create a collaborative Google Slide presentation. We will share the presentations next Thursday, and on Friday we are going to do some Native American-themed crafts together. We have adjoining classrooms with a retracting wall, so we are just going to create one big classroom! Sure, it's probably going to get a little crazy when we open up the wall (the kids always think it's so cool!), but I am really excited to try this out. I think the students are going to get a lot out of it, and I think they are really looking forward to combining classrooms! And hey, maybe this will work out really well and will lead to other combined projects for our two classrooms...

Mindfulness thought for the week (again, thanks to Tom J Deters and the ProYou Podcast for the Facebook post): The most important thing isn't to be perfect.