Fair Play in the Funky Monkey Classroom

Fair Play Summary

Fair Play in the Funky Monkey 2nd grade classroom began with a quick “visit” with last year’s Athlete Mentor, Christian Taylor.  We watched his video about Fair Play and got ready to rock this month’s challenge! Viewing the video was especially fun for my kiddos with siblings in last year’s class.

The book Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens was a fun way to discuss what fair play DID not look like.  It was great to have the kids recognize that both the hare and the bear were making unfair choices.  As a group we talked about other ways the characters could have resolved their conflict. Next, we completed a close-read of a short story called “Tag! You’re It!”.  In this story several children are playing a game of tag and  come into conflict when some new children ask to join the game.  In addition to our usual text-coding, we highlighted when we came across an example of fair play in the passage. After reading we responded in our journals to the following question: What is fair play? Give an example of fair play and one of unfair play. It was great to link this idea to our daily playground recess time.

The following week we watched Adam Page’s Fair Play video and then we held a Minute-to Win-it Tournament!  We started with:

Cup Stack Challenge: 

Two players started with a stack of 25 red cups with one blue cup at the top of the stack. Both began by moving the top cup to the bottom of the stack, and continuing to move cups from the top to the bottom until the blue cup was back at the top of the stack.

Penny Stack:

Players from each table team stacked 25 pennies in under a minute using only one hand. Some students needed to hold their hand behind their back to keep form using two hands.  That whole “integrity thing” came into play!

Cookie Face:

This was  a great game to wrap up the tournament  because all of my students could compete at the same time. Each player placed a cookie on his/her forehead, and worked toward the goal of getting the cookie into his/her mouth using only facial muscles (in 1 minute or less). No hands! This was tougher than we expected but very funny to watch!

Our tournament wrapped up with another journal reflection and a brief awards ceremony.   I expect the words “make sure you play fair” to be used in my classroom well into June!

Make sure you check out our Fair Play video! 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc9wmlC8XvA&feature=youtu.be

Standards Addressed in this Challenge:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.3

Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.6  

Acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters, including by speaking in a different voice for each character when reading dialogue aloud.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.2.8

Recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.