Team Building AND Writing Combined

Today is "Team Building Tuesday" in my classroom for morning meeting. The activity they completed today involved the following:

I split the students into small groups of about 3-4 students. There has to be an even number of groups. After the students got into their small groups I told them their instructions. Each group was going to be assigned ANOTHER group in the room. They were to create a story using the group members from their assigned team as their characters. Example: Group A consisted of Student 1, 2, 3, and 4 Group B consisted of Student 5, 6, 7, and 8. Group A writes about students 5, 6, 7, and 8 and Group B writes about Student 1, 2, 3, and 4. They had the first 5-10 minutes to brainstorm character traits and strengths about the classmates they had been assigned as their characters. After that time they had about 15 minutes to create their stories.

Afterwards, we came together and the students voted to read each of the group's writings. They were HILARIOUS and very positive! The students gave a lot of positive feedback and even asked me to do it again in the future weeks.

Great way to incorporate writing into a team building activity!

Excerpts from their writing:
"Once upon a time there were three friends named Jacob, Emma, and Maegan. Jacob was funny, goofy, and creative. Maegan is intelligent, a great artist, and caring. Emma is a great softball player, she's smart and creative. One day they all met up at the jungle by their pet monkey named Mr. What'cha'ma'call it. When they got to the jungle Maegan said "Do you want to paint a picture of monkeys and bananas?" They hung the picture when they were done in a tree and started playing softball when WHACK! Emma hit the ball through the picture. Jacob quickly said "Uh oh girlfriend."

Their first instinct was the repaint the picture but they realized they were out of paint. Then Jacob started climbing the tree to Mr. What'cha'ma'call it and he was dining on bananas so he grabbed him and smaced him on the canvas. The next day when they went back to school they gave the picture to Ms. B and she said it looked like an elephant."

IDIOM ACTIVITY

I typed up a list of popular idioms- one for every student. They had to create an illustration for the literal meaning of their idiom. Just like a laffy taffy joke you have to unfold the flap to find out what idiom the illustration represents.

See photographs:

I'm shaking in my boots.

I have butterflies in my stomach.

I'm all ears.

I'm keeping an eye on you.

Give me a hand.

You broke my heart.

You're pulling my leg.

I'm sleeping like a log.

I'm in a pickle.

I'm a couch potato.

It's raining cats and dogs.

The cat's got my tounge.

I'm feeling under the weather.

They turned out AMAZING!

Hand Signals

Want to cut back on 

"Can I go to the bathroom?"s

"I need to sharpen my pencil."s

?

Try this:

It works like a charm!!

PRESIDENT'S DAY Poetry

I read the book So You Want to Be President to the students on President's Day morning. We had studying Presidents using various President books from the library the whole week before we sat down as a class and read this one out loud. When we were finished the students were to complete an ACROSTIC poem (we are in our poetry unit) with the word PRESIDENT. Students were given the freedom to decide if they wanted to:

* "become the president" and create a poem about themselves as president

* choose a specific president and discuss them

* speak about presidents characteristics and traits in general

* use all information they learned about any of our present or past presidents and create the poem using that information.

Powerpoint on Acrostic Poems-

•Is a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message

•Example:

▫C-reative by nature.

▫O-riginally designed.

▫R-idiculously awesome.

▫I-nvolved with helping others.

Final Products:

The follow-up writing activity was the following:

If you were the President of the United States (or the leader of your country if outside the U.S.) what do you think you would do to change your country for the better? Who would your top advisors be? How would you deal with all the tough problems?

MLK Day

For MLK Day we watched his I Have A Dream speech (found online). Half of the students were given pencils that were sharpened perfectly with a full eraser. Whenever their pencil broke during the activity they were given a brand new perfectly sharpened pencil. The other half of the students were given 1/4th of a full pencil sized pencils that had dull tips and little to no erasers. If their pencil broke they had to share with a friend or they were left without anything to write with. 

The activity for during the video was that the students had to tally mark how many times they heard the following words on an activity sheet provided for them:

Freedom

Free

Rights

Dream

Hope

America

American

Nation

Afterwards we discussed the video but only allowed students who had sharpened pencils to answer and provide insight and reflection from the video. The students who were given the poorly taken care of pencils started to get frustrated, they got loud, and some even gave up. After about 2-3 minutes we opened it up for a whole group discussion and focused a lot on the challenges that were faced with the pencils throughout the activity and how that can relate back to the I Have A Dream speech.

This activity really hit home to the students.

When we were done with the video activity and discussion students were given a dream bubble (picture above) to illustrate their dreams for: Themselves, Their Country, and Their World. I challenged students to think outside of the box and to get creative and personal with their dreams.

Ecosystems: Food Chains

This is an informal assessment to make sure the students understood the differences between producers, consumers, decomposers AND the steps of a food chain. The students were directed to complete the following:

Create a food chain that follows the correct order. It must include a source of energy, one producer, two consumers, and a decomposer. It must also have labels, a picture, and the title of the organism (producer, consumer, decomposer).

Yellow paper- sunlight

Green paper- producer

Orange paper- consumers

Brown paper- decomposers

Here is what they came up with:

Word Work

As a word work activity I created my own classroom BOGGLE board. Every week I start a new one on Friday and the students have until the following Thursday to turn it in to me. 

Rules:

Must be at least three letters.

Every word must be numbered.

There needs to be a total count on their page.

It is MANDATORY that you turn in SOMETHING (at least 25 words) by Thursday at the end of the day.

This is a GREAT activity to work on word work AND a great classroom filler in between tasks or if someone finishes early.

On Friday morning after I've "scanned" the list for any words that are NOT words there are two people who win: 1. Most Words   2. Longest Word and they pick from the prize bucket.