So we had the first full week of school for the first time in it seems like a month here, and the snow and weather have played havoc. While it is nice to have the break on occasion, the shorten days make my short block even shorter and challenging to get stuff done. It did allow me some time to take part in lots of twitter chats and get new ideas for the classroom. I've been intrigued with the idea of gamification in the classroom and how I can bring competition into my room to hopefully push my students engagement and desire to learn. So with the Winter Olympics going on, I thought it'd be a perfect way to integrate this for my 7th graders. My 7th graders have been a chore this year. It's a new content for me, so you add that to what is the usual craziness of 7th grade and it is stressful to say the least some days. So rather than finding some of the traditional and probably boring ways to teach culture, we have a great competitive way to do so now.
The students were first randomly chosen and picked their countries. I could tell that my students aren't really following the games since British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Mexico and Peru were all chosen while Sweden and Finland weren't picked in either class. So we split it up into two weeks, week one is the training. Students had to learn some of the general information about their country along with several different parts of their culture, the country's rivals and how they were doing in Sochi. The students will get a medal for how in depth their information was and can earn bonus medals for explaining why the cultural expressions were so important in their country. I have a PD day on Monday, so we had to move our opening ceremonies back a day. The students also have to make or recreate their countries flag and we'll have them walk in to our arena. I'm hoping the games go over well. They'll have the trivia competition tomorrow, our Opening Ceremonies will be Tuesday and the students will give short presentations about what they learned on Tuesday and Wednesday. I've set up a biathlon for Thursday where the students will have to race and also hit targets (tennis balls at coke bottles) and we'll use our classroom bball hoop for some Pop-a-shot finale. If nothing else, it'll get them out of the classroom for a bit. Hopefully it'll be fun, I'll try to get some good pictures.
My 8th graders continue to impress. We used the www.mission-us.org interactive histories and used the story of Lucy and her journey as a runaway slave. The kids loved it, they loved the story, were furious when they got caught or Lucy messed up, and asked some great questions to Lucy as our ticket out the door. The next day we learned about John Brown, and they again we're interested, asked great questions. Had students leave the room saying "that was cool, we should learn more about guys like him." Glad to know they're liking it and learning a bit too. I also started using Remind101 and it's been really good. I definitely recommend it to anyone.
Alright, back to grad school work and papers. Thanks for reading, I'll have the Olympics results next weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment