The Crayon Box That Talked

Today we continued to talk about what makes us unique. I read The Crayon Box That Talked and we talked about how the crayons in the book were like the members in our class. Each color is unique, but each color is needed. In our classroom, we work as a team-we are a family. Each of us brings something different in to our room. I drew a picture on the smart board of a house, tree, clouds, and the sun, but I only used a blue "marker." I told the class that I am the blue in our class, but showed them that you can't draw an accurate picture with only a blue marker. We decided that green would represent the boys in our room and I colored over my blue grass green and made the leaves on the trees green too. The girls in our class were represented by red and I colored the flowers in our picture red. Each group of people-girls, boys, classroom helpers, leader of the day, and aide- were represented by a color. The students were able to see that each color was very important in the picture, much like each person is very important in our class. 

We have been in school for 15 days and I have already seen a huge difference in your children. Research has shown that it takes, at least, 6 weeks for students just to understand the rules and procedures of each classroom. Yes, we still have some work to do, but we are improving! Most of the students un-packed their backpack and brought notes and homework to my desk this morning completely on their own- that in itself is a huge improvement. Talk to your children about working as a team in the classroom and encouraging their teammates to try their hardest. 

I am slowly moving into student directed learning and want my students to have a sense of ownership in their classroom with what they learn and how they and their teammates are acting. I like the idea of having the students deal with small problems (she touched me) with other students on their own. I have been working with them to learn our debug system. In the debug system the students talk out problems between themselves, it takes away the whole he said/ she said issue. We will be discussing peer mediation a little later in the year, as well. 

Reminder, please send your child's puzzle piece back to school tomorrow. Decorate the side that has the picture on it.