February's Monday Made It

YAY! Monday Made It! Let's go!

P.S. 3/4 of these have nothing to do with school and I am ok with that!

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I finally made something with all of the beautiful cards we received during our season of engagement and wedding. I bought a square paper punch and then simply glued on one line at a time until I filled in the mat. I love it! It has such good memories and good wishes attached to it. I am hanging it in our bathroom, where it will repeat the scheme of small square tiles like in our shower area.

My sister and I attended a workshop on Protestant prayer beads this past weekend and we got to make some of our own! We are both excited to use these as prayer tools during the Lenten season and hopefully into the future. Check out Prayerworks Studio on ETSY for more info abut using prayer beads and to purchase prayer beads or prayer bead kits.

 

Last week was all about cooking with new ingredients for me! For this recipe, my new ingredient was rice noodles. Let me just say, this was such a delicious, refreshing, but also filling tilapia recipe. Check it out here! If you love tilapia and coconut milk as much as we do, you will love this recipe!

I made some read aloud guides for books which address homelessness and food insecurity. This is for an upcoming expedition for my students, but it includes this year's Newbery award winner. Check out this free, albeit simple, resource to ramp up your read aloud time with higher order questions! Fun fact: I made these resources on my school computer, which crashed just last week. So I will get to make them all over again soon! Yay! Luckily, I had sent all of the resources as PDF to my team before this, but I just can't stand not having things that are editable (and let's face it, I will admit to needing to edit a few typos). 

Happy Valentine's Week, everyone! 

Perseverance & Resilience

The stage was set. The challenge was given. I could hardly wait to watch my students tackle their engineering challenge to kick off our study of motion. "They are going to be amazing!" I thought, "They will grow and stretch and be motivated by their learning and hard work. In fact, I bet some of them will be so inspired by my teaching methods that they will grow up to be Scientists!"

And then....

And then!

They crumbled. The met the challenge with excitement. And then it met them and they turned into precious little balls of helplessness and crushed self esteem. All within five minutes.

Ok, I may be exaggerating, but just know that there were more than a couple of kids for whom this was true. They were a little crushed. And I was a little crushed, too!

So it made me ask myself some questions:
How exactly can I better teach and instill perseverance and resilience in my students?
What have I done in the past to encourage helplessness. Furthermore, how can I change that as we move forward?

So I picked 2 things to try for next time:

1. To Teach: I decided to go back to our school-wide Habits of Scholarship: Craftsmanship, Perseverance, and Collaboration. We spent some morning meetings using our dictionary, thesaurus, and base words skills to develop stronger definitions and examples of these. It was really important for us to take a step back, slow down, and work on making these words a bigger part of the culture in our classroom.

2. To Change: I have got to stop "spinning plates" during my more challenging assignments. Do you know what I mean? When you can't get to conferencing, listening in, and facilitating because you are answering questions, putting out fires, and restating instructions 20 million times? So, this week we started with writing. We instituted a "Quiet 10" time at the beginning of Writing Workshop where students and I are to be writing with no talking. Students are told to be writers and problem solvers. So far they are doing a great job! This is just one first step to improving the independence and "stick-with-it-ness" for the class!