This is not my first blog post about growth mindset. But I find that it comes up every year in different ways in my classroom; as I teach different groups of students, or different content, or different individuals, I continue to learn more about ways of promoting growth mindset, as well as potential barriers that…
Every week, our school community gathers for Community Meeting, where we reflect on our Quaker values and share time together in the manner of a Quaker meeting. Recently, when we started reflecting on Peace, I changed the format of Community Meeting. Our habit in Community Meeting was to have a discussion and then a query,…
Most of the Field Museum’s collection is in the basement. There are almost 20 million taxidermied animal specimens in their collection. A few thousand are on display. Every artifact that reaches the floor represents a choice. It was chosen as an important piece of our natural history that deserves to be seen and studied. The…
Team Time is a weekly event when teams made up of students from different classrooms and grades come together for fun, friendly competition and time together. Sometimes it is hard to find an activity that works for all ages in the team, but this week’s activity worked! For this week’s team time, students had the challenge…
Math class is the first academic subject of the day, and in my class, we always try to start with a brain teaser of some kind. Some weeks, it’s a form of equation construction that the kids can each approach on their own level, such as ___ x ____ = 15. The two missing terms…
To culminate our unit on narrative writing we wrote “small moment stories” which were detailed true stories from our own lives. To cap this off, my class had a writing celebration and invited family and friends to join us for a reading. The process leading up to the celebration – choosing a story, revising,…