Last week I put my class of 27 students into tribes, using the seven friends strategy described in the manual. It was a lot of work finding the right combination, but so far each group seems to be working well. I have only one student who is disliked by the majority of the class but her group has been positive and inclusive so far.

I have tied building the sense of team with these groups by teaching government (a social studies topic) along with introducing tribes. We studied Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and then each group wrote their own charter – an agreement of how they are going to get along this year. Then we studied some of Canada’s symbols and the history of our flag. Each group then was charged with coming up with a group name, flag and symbol – all of which needed to be inclusive of each group member, easy to remember and easy to reproduce. This really helped to gel the groups and got them excited about being on a team. I used the additional activities of the Slip Game and Group Doodle to help build inclusion within the new groups.

I have also tied this into the health objectives for grades 5 and 6 – which include items around teamwork and solving/mediating conflict in groups.

My next step is to have each group create a poster that includes their flag, group name, group members’ names, group symbol and their charter. We created the criteria together of what would make a good finished product.  Groups had to plan their poster first and use the criteria to show me they were ready to move on to the good copy. Their plan had to include what role each group member was going to take in completing the final copy.

I’ll post about how this all goes in a few weeks.

It’s hard to believe it is already November. I am hoping to be able to set aside some time to update this blog and send an email to everyone.

One thing that I added this year was an Appreciation Dictionary. When discussing our agreements/rules, I had students brainstorm a list of appreciation sentences or activities that we could use through out the year. It has remained posted – so it is a good reminder to me about including appreciation as often as possible. Some ideas include:

• a round of applause (students clap their hands in a circle)
• a salute
• a brain wave (on hand is resting on the forehead and fingers wiggle)
• microwave (students wave with their pinky)
• WOW (students put three fingers up on each hand, place each hand on one side of an open mouth to spell WOW).

It’s been successful and fun so far!

I just wanted to write a short post to let you all know I am thinking of you all. It was great to read Jannine’s comment on the reflections page! I have a lot of things that I would like to get going on this website – posting the remaining days (5 and 7 I think) as well as regularly posting comments about what is happening in my classroom related to the topics we discussed this summer.

I hope you will be patient with me for the month of September! Please keep in touch with each other.

Thank you to all workshop participants for a wonderful two weeks. I can’t wait to see where all of our journeys over this year take us! Keep in touch!

Yes it is the last day of our workshop and I am assigning homework! While it is the end of our workshop this year, we are only partly done our journey together.

1. Try your lesson this year and reflect on how it went.
2. Try your energizer this year and reflect on how it went.
3. Try some of the other strategies we explored in the workshop.
4. Bring the follow things back with you next year (so plan on a good place to keep them for a year!):
      – TRIBES book
      - Your lesson and reflection
      - Your energizer and reflection
      - Your Personal Journaling entry (and if possible all the other reflections you did this workshop). 

We will do another Technology Tic Tac Toe. Please open the document Tic Tac Toe Two.

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. I am looking forward to seeing what everyone has done for their homework. I am a little behind on the daily strategies – hopefully I will have Day Three and Four up soon!

Please refer to your Tic Tac Toe handout for the specific activities.

Teaching Strategies Section
1. ePals at www.epals.com
               Visit the Teacher Forums once signed in.
2. Room Nine’s Blog at http://sites.epals.com/roomnine/
    As the activity is over, I have removed password information. Please
    email me at coletteinbelize@gmail.com for a username and 
    password if you want to review student examples.          

Reflect and Record Section
Reflection Page

Share Section
Share Page

This weblog is meant to be a place where people who participated in the 2008 Belize City LA workshops can access files, keep in touch and contact me: coletteinbelize@gmail.com.

I will try to provide a summary of strategies that we look at on a page for each day.