A Cardboard Box

Today's post is not technically school related, but just a reminder that something can always be made out of nothing. Back when I was taking my Early Childhood courses, I had a professor who always talked about open-ended art rather than giving children coloring sheets or templates. That's something I always try to keep in mind - cookie-cutter projects are cute for a hallway display, but allowing children to have their own interpretation of a project gives them ownership, a chance to learn from mistakes, an opportunity to problem-solve and an outlet for creative thinking.

Around my house we have lots of cardboard boxes. We buy wipes and diapers in bulk from Sam's Club so we have boxes from those, plus boxes of copy paper since I try to pick up a case whenever its on sale (my school only gives me one ream a month). With all these boxes lying around, it was inevitable that sooner or later Sullivan would be placed in one.


His favorite thing is to sit in his well-padded box with a book or two and a sheet thrown over his head - the squealing that ensues is hilarious!

Well, when his sister, Moira, who is 14, saw how much he liked boxes, she decided to make him a "spaceship". This required access to a little bit of spray paint, glue and the debris of my craft closet. She worked for several days on this, tweaking the idea as she encountered difficulties or thought of better ways to do what she wanted. Even at the last minute she was adding things (a plastic egg filled with rice and tied to the dashboard) but finally, on Sunday, she unveiled her creation:

 

 

What could our students create if we gave them access to materials and let them at it? Sure, maybe it won't be something that we can display in our hallways, and it might not even turn out to be something that can be displayed at all, but its the act of creating itself that we need to encourage! I challenge you to let your students cut and paste and color and see what happens!  I'm going to be digging out all of my scraps and whatsits and letting my students go to town - I promise to post about the experience later this week!

Remember,  when we allow children room to create and explore, they just might surprise us with something incredible!

The Caterpillars are Rampaging!

It's that time of year again - the count down to the end has begun! I'm desperately trying to cram all I can into these last 25 days! Unfortunately I don't have time for it all, so now I have to pick and choose which activities are must-dos and which can be skipped this year.

One thing that is going really well is our Butterfly Life Cycle unit. I am so happy I decided to go with eggs this year! For the first week or so after we placed the eggs on our plants we couldn't really tell we had caterpillars, except for a few small holes on the leaves. Well, this week we got a major lesson in the ravenous nature of caterpillars:

 At the beginning of the week we were thrilled that we could actually see the caterpillars and attempt to count them. We had some great discussions about camouflage and why it was important that the caterpillars blend in with the color of the leaves they like to eat. Look how lush all those cauliflower, cabbage, radish and brussel sprout plants look! I was really proud that we had succeeded in growing the plants our caterpillars needed.

 

Unfortunately, by Thursday the caterpillars had completely decimated our plants. Seemingly overnight we went from just a few leaves with holes to not a single leaf left!

  

 When we came in on Thursday morning we were able to get a more exact count of our caterpillars since they had decided to try to escape in search of more food - almost every caterpillar had made its way to the top of the netting!

 

This did enable us to finally get an up close and personal look at the little buggers :)

It also led to some great conversations about why farmers would have a problem with caterpillars. Although my littles love the caterpillars and think it's great that we can see them eating so much, they were able to put themselves in the farmers' shoes and realize that if they had caterpillars eating all the crops that would be very hard financially. We talked about how farmers stop bugs from eating their plants - using pesticides and even releasing lady bugs. I love how though-provoking science can be at this age - something as simple as watching caterpillars has led to some big connections! And, most of these conversations would not have been possible if we were using the caterpillars that come with the brown goop to eat!

UPDATE: For those of you curious as to where to get the eggs, I ordered mine from Carolina Biological. They sent enough eggs to ensure "5-6 butterflies" and we had at least 13 caterpillars hatch! If you're wondering about our plants, I blogged about that here. Once we were ready for the caterpillars I just transplanted our seedlings to a pot and placed it in our butterfly net.

Now that we've had to finish up our Plant Life Cycle and switch our caterpillars to cabbage leaves from the grocery store, we're setting up our incubator in preparation for our Chicken Life Cycle! I'm also considering whether we have time for these:

 Any clue what they are? Head over to  my FB page to guess! You could win your choice of Life Cycle packs from my store!

Alright, to finish up this post, here is a picture of Sullivan with Olaf - we couldn't resist when we saw it at JCPenny lol!

Bright Idea for Managing Hallway Behavior!

I'm joining up for another Bright Ideas blog hop! There are 150 bloggers, all with awesome FREE ideas and tips!

My tip this week is a management tool. Everyone knows what a line of students in a hallway should look like: quiet, facing forward, hands to themselves. My class this year can't handle that. Well, about 1/2 of them can, but the other 1/2 find it incredibly difficult. I do everything I can to avoid having to be in the hallway for a prolonged period - I don't go to lunch until I know the other classes have cleared the cafeteria line, we're the last ones into assemblies, we're the first to leave assemblies etc.

However, this class also can't handle going to the bathroom on their own (as our custodians can attest to!) so we have to do whole class bathroom breaks. With 26 kiddos, this can take a long time. I have several students that have impulse control issues, and this is very apparent while waiting in line. I tried redirection, making my expectations clear, having consequences etc. Ultimately though, I found that our bathroom breaks were a big negative part of the day - which of course followed us back into the classroom as well.

So, how do I remove the negative from our bathroom breaks? By changing my expectations! I can't expect this year's kiddos to be able to do everything previous year's classes have done. Instead of trying to get them to stand still and be quiet, I had to give them something to do and focus on. Since our bathroom breaks are so long it helps that this is educational too.

We've been working on fluency and sight words a lot, so I came up with the idea of using Fry's Phrases on poster boards. I chose phrases from the first 300 and wrote them on the ghostline posters. I taped these to the walls in the foyer outside our bathroom. Each time we head out for a bathroom break we bring a pointer from the classroom with us.

Now instead of saying "Please keep your hands to yourself." or "Remember, our voices are off in the hallways.", I say things like "I'm looking for the antonym of short." or "Find a word that ends in a digraph." or "Can you find a silent e word?". The beauty of this is that I can make this as difficult or as easy as my kids can handle. I have some CVC words on the posters so my lowest kiddos have a chance at identifying those, but I can make it super challenging for my higher level kiddos by asking for them to identify words with blends or multiple syllables etc. We look for verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs as well as punctuation too.

 Now, the management part comes with the fact that they only get a turn with the pointer if they are standing in line quietly, directly behind the person in front of them. They also don't get to raise their hand until they've found the word I'm looking for, which means that everyone is scanning the posters trying to find the word. Since they're all working for a turn, I don't ever have to get on them about line procedures any more.They're no longer bored since they're focused on reading the posters, trying to find the words before a friend. This is fast paced too, so in a single bathroom break almost everyone gets a turn, which gives them the opportunity for movement so they don't have to stand still as long.

I used a multicolor pack of posters so I can give hints like "You might want to look at the green poster."  too, but also because the colors are naturally appealing to the kids. I started off with only 3 posters, but have progressed to having 7 taped up now. Sometimes I'll just ask someone to read a whole poster, or a whole line. The point is to keep changing it up so that it's something new to engage them each time.

I hope this idea helps some of you who are having problems with hallway procedures. Sometimes it's helpful to have that reminder that expectations need to be realistic and can change to reflect your class. I'm not saying to lower your expectations, but if a procedure isn't working you have to see if there are other ways to get the desired result - in this case a class that didn't disturb others while waiting for the bathroom!

Be sure to check out all the other Bright Ideas from this month:

An InLinkz Link-up