What to Do about Know-it-Alls
I teacher gifted learners at the moment and an advanced math group. When you teach these type of kids, there is a fine line between sharing what you know and vomiting information. I share this with students before it gets to the point of vomiting information. Not only is it a nice proverb speak, it is a tiny bit of history since Theodore Roosevelt shared it. I tell my students that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. I introduce this in a type of circle time, they I can refer to it if I notice children becoming know-it-alls or gravitating towards arrogance. You are welcome to the sign also. I am sharing it with you here.
I Didn’t Take Home the Class Pet, but I Did Take These!
You would think I must have thrown out the old science experiment which we begin in the fall. If you have followed my blog before, you would have seen our LOVE and HATE jars science experiment. I never threw them out but let them sit the rest of the year. I honestly thought it would make the experiment go awry. Very few kids talked to them if at all since January. I kept telling the kids we would smell them and open them on the last day of school. Very few kids came on that day, but we opened them. The smell was even more pronounced than the original 30 days of experiment. The jars had basically sat in the room for 5ish months. Again this experiment blows my mind every time! What an amazing weapon our mouth is for good or evil towards others! If you do choose to do this experiment, I recommend doing the strawberries because the smell is much easier on the nose. However, the rice shows. a more dramatic visual effect.
So, how could I throw out such an amazing quantum physics experiment! I took it home for the summer. It sits in the kitchen on the floor by a window. Sometimes I talk to the jars–strawberries of 2023!
What is the Pile of Possibilities?
Since I currently teach GT, I usually have a collection of junk lying around. I especially have extra junk and recyclables when we are working on a project. This would work well for an art teacher or anyone who is making a project with recyclable items. I decided to name my junk container to spark more imagination in the room. It is now called the “Pile of Possibilities” after reading the book the Fantastic Bureau of Imagination.
I recently was introduced to a book called the Federal Bureau of Imagination. This book is so fun! You must read it to your child audience! There is another book coming soon after that called Failabrations! I can’t wait to read it!
I hope these books start the imagination in your classroom also!
Do Your Pencils Need a Trip to the Gym?
Since my classroom has “marker heaven” and “marker jail“, we thought it could use a pencil gym. This is a place where pencils go to get into shape. This would also be knows as the pencil sharpener. I hope you can incorporate some of this fun into your classroom!
Do Your Students Not Follow Directions? Try this!
To increase efficiency, when I am teaching very young children such as in kindergarten, I do this. After my lesson, I say, “okay, step one think.” I elaborate on what I want them to think about. I hold my finger up to my temple and tap it like I am thinking. I see the children imitating this when they go back to their seats from sitting at the carpet.
Then I say, “Step two glue.” (or whatever I want step two to be.) I hold my hand out in front of me and lightly slap the back of my hand like I am gluing something down. The children do this with me.
Then I say, “Step 3. add details.” I hold up both of my index fingers like I am making little dots everywhere with my fingers. After I have explained everything I want the students to do, I have the students repeat the whole process with me. It sounds something like this…
“Okay, what is step one?” The students tell me with hand motions.
“What is step two? The students tell me with hand motions.
“What is step three? Again the students tell me with hand motions.
Then I send them to their seats and they sometimes get the directions out of order, but it is easy to refer to the step one, step two, or step three because they remember when they are listed succinctly like that. I have had a lot of success with students following directions in this step one, step two, and step three fashion. Most children can hold three things in their minds to work towards. I hope this helps improve your classroom management!
Get Student Attention with These!
I wore these today. As I walked down the hallway, I had multiple kindergarteners tell me they liked my glasses. Looking at them makes me smile, too! I got the glasses from Amazon and the eyelashes from the Dollar Tree. These work great for a lesson on being original!
Are YOU ready…Freddy?
Every time I enter a K-2 classroom to teach enrichment, I bring Freddy. Freddy is one of my classroom management posters. I bought some clipart and added a “Ready” title to the bottom of this page. The “Freddy” part kind of evolved with the children’s input. What is great about Freddy is that he looks exactly like I want the children to look when I am teaching. At the beginning of the year, we talk about what it looks like to listen and pay attention. Then as I am teaching, I walk around with Freddy and point to him when I see children not acting appropriately. Freddy and his friends are in page protectors in a binder that I carry with me when I am teaching an enrichment class, which lasts about 30-40 minutes.
Freddy has friends, too. With the children’s help I also have named a “Ready Betty”. As time has progressed, Freddy has made friends and I have included them in the binder, too. In addition, I have included a “lip sandwich” poster. I must give credit to a teacher friend for a lip sandwich idea. We discuss what a lip sandwich is at the beginning of the year so that children know the expectation. More than anything, showing them what Ready Freddy looks like gets results whether on the carpet in “criss cross applesauce” style or when children are at their seat. My principal even noticed how effective the posters were and commented on this, and I have had teachers ask their students to get in the Ready Freddy position.
Sometimes I am able to make a story about how Freddy is watching the children and I cover my eyes for five seconds and count and say that I know they will be ready when I open my eyes. I have also told children that Freddy is friends with Elf or Santa at Christmas. There are a myriad of fun imaginative stories you can make up where Freddy is involved especially since children thrive on imagination.
Here is the poster set I made for use at my school. There are most multicultural groups represented in this set.
Have You Filled a Bucket Lesson Fun! {Giveaway}
One of my friends calls it punting when you come up with a lesson at the last minute that turns out better than one you spent hours planning. Now, I did have a ready to go lesson and was ready to teach it when I thought this idea would be so much better. In a school where I have difficulty with the students treating one another with kindness, this idea seemed perfect. I used the idea from Have You Filled a Bucket Today? for this lesson, but I never actually got around to reading the book.
Here is what I did. I brought a bucket of sorts which actually was a Dollar Tree gift box and it was filled with red die cut hearts and puff balls. I gathered the students in a circle and threw out puffballs one at a time while saying things that kids say to one another that are hurtful. For example, “you’re ugly, your breath stinks, you’re wearing cheap shoes, no one likes you, you can’t play kickball” etc. Every time I would say an ugly comment I would drop a puffball or heart on the floor. Then I showed the kids how the box is like your heart and it is like you are hurting someone when you say mean things to them.
Next, I gave each child a puffball in the circle and had them think of something nice to say about someone else in the circle. I started so that the students had an example to follow. Then as they said a nice comment about someone, I let them put the puffball back in the box. Then at the end I let the kids see how the box was filled up because they said nice things about one another.
Note: It is hard to get young children to say something nice about someone that isn’t about their physical appearance, so this requires modeling or else the children will say that johnny has a nice shirt or that they like someone’s hair. After we sat on the carpet and did all of this I had the children write something on a paper heart that they would say nice about someone else. Then I collected all of the hearts and made a bucket to post on the wall so that the children could be reminded of what we had talked about.
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Wish I Had Known About the Brain!
A couple of years in a row now my partners at other schools have begun the year teaching about the brain and mindsets. I was like, “Yeah, that sounds great.” BUT, I had already planned something else in my mind. They shared their lessons with me and they all revolved around this book…Your Fantastic Elastic Brain by Deak Ph.D., JoAnn and Sarah Ackerley.
Here is a brief sketch of what I did with my students in 1st and 2nd grades this year. These were three 30 minute enrichment lessons. Most of this I cannot take credit for since I didn’t write the lessons, but I adapted them for my own use.
Day 1: I read the first few pages of the book and we learned the parts of the brain here as we touched the parts of the brain on our heads, we talked about each part’s function. We did a coloring sheet in which students colored parts of the brain like are on this page of the book (sorry, but I am not at liberty to share the coloring page).
We also sang with this Story Bots You Tube song.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnl7DLSNFV8[/embedyt]Day 2: We read the next few pages of the book and reviewed the parts of the brain. We acted out different scenarios which were pre-prepared (I didn’t come up with them on the spot in other words). Students had to guess which parts of the brain they thought were being used to perform the actions that the children were doing.
Day 3: We read the last few pages of the book, and made neurons with our arms, palms, and fingers. We talked about how electrical impulses travel down the neurons to tell the body what to do. Then I talked to students about how mistakes are the biggest teacher (reiterating what the book says). I brought up the idea of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. I held a balloon and blew it up. I said this is like a growth mindset. I also held up a flat balloon and said this is a fixed mindset. Then I asked students what they could do to make it easier to blow up the balloon. I wanted them to tell me to stretch it (like their brain). From this point, I found a random fixed mindset/growth mindset poster on the internet and read it while holding the balloon. I had students check phrases they had said before on both the fixed and growth mindset side. This website has a good chart about characteristics of fixed and growth mindset patterns.
What I love when teaching about the brain and fixed/growth mindset is that in essence you are teaching children the power of choices to let their mind expand or stay stagnant. With my older students, I also discussed how when you let your mind go a certain direction over and over it makes a deeper pathway similar to when you walk on the grass a whole lot. I ask the students what helps the grass to stop being dead in the same spot. Students invariably are able to say that you stop walking on it and when the rain comes it grows back up. So it is with anyone’s brain. They stop thinking the worst and the grass grows back up. Their brain stops having that pathway.
I hope you get a chance to teach about the brain and mindsets in your classroom. You won’t regret it!
How Can You Manage Peer Help?
I am currently having my students make videos. This is the third year I have done so. I don’t mind students helping one another if one wants to be in the video while another holds the camera for the rest of the students. However, what I do mind is when the students seem to be spending too much time helping someone and then forget about themselves. Kind and caring kids seem to have this happen often. To help avoid anyone being taken advantage of, I made these time sheets. These would work for any task–not just video work. In the past I have also had that problem with students helping others with math problems
I have developed a solution to this problem, and you can have it here for free to help you manage your students, too! 🙂 At the top you tell students how many minutes they are allotted to help others and they keep track of the time they have helped others on the sheet. Have them keep this page in an easy to reach place, so they can easily pull it out when they are helping other students.
