Define Important

"Imagine being in a room where everything is black and you're not allowed to hear!"

This was one of my students expressing his fascination with Heller Keller's life with one of his peers. Today I began my unit on Important People in American History. My students became so much more engaged with this lesson than I ever could have imagined. After a mystery themed motivational device the entire class was focused in on the task at hand. Everyone was assigned a person from our class's "Wall of Fame" (which was made up of 9 important people from American history). We spent a while talking about what "important" means for the sake of this lesson. To my surprise this concept was easily grasped which made me confident the rest of the lesson would go smoothly. Using their iPads, QR codes and YouTube they each separated into their own area in the classroom to begin their research. After my last technology heavy lesson having many technology issues I was extremely relieved to have everything work as planned.  My original idea was to have them watch their video and then spend time in the class library until everyone was finished. To my surprise after they finished I saw them eagerly finding other peers to share the story of their important person. Even after we concluded their lesson they were talking about their findings on their way to health. This made me so excited to continue this unit with everyone.

Today we had a lot of behavior issues with the students. How the day is structured and how each subject is designed the students spend very little time actually in their seats at their desk. Surprisingly though, even during this minimal seat work time, a majority of the children are constantly getting up and walking around the class to see what everyone else is working on. This obviously causes a disturbance to other students, and in the long run, their work is not getting done. The classroom I'm using a clip chart for behavior. You start in the middle each day, for positive behavior you move up and when you need re-corrected you move down. There were points in the day where almost half of the class had their clips on "moved down" spaces. Prior to Christmas everyone's behavior was similar to this, but I thought after getting back into "school mode" come January things would settle down. My co-op shared the same opinion and we are both thinking of ways to get these common behavior issues ironed out. Let's hope for a better behavior day tomorrow.