My students were very excited to share their learning with you for our #HealthyLiving challenge! As you saw in our last post, we dove into making healthy choices in regards to food, exercise, and sleep. However, we all know that there's more to it than just choose veggies over chips. We used so many resources from asklistenlearn.org! Their presentation of the info is done so with real thought to the intended audience. I had a couple of teachers say that they'd have a difficult time having such a heavy conversation with their kiddos...but I was quick to inform them that these resources are WICKED COOL! I gave them the choice to write about what they learned. They chose from the list of options and went from there! Their work is very impressive. Mind you, much of this was done in the afternoon after mornings of state assessments...so you can imagine the brain power it took. We were ALL exhausted! I challenged them to have discussions at home and even got a couple of messages thanking me for sharing the resources with families. They would not have known how to approach the topic without them...so I'm glad we have this partnership and are able to share such valuable and meaningful conversations with our kiddos. Here are a few entries...I have a zillion more as many of them chose to do more than one option on the list! An Essay from Elijah Short Story by Iziah Essay by Nichol Play by Amy Play by Antonio Poems by Iziah
Nate had a great message for my students this month! While talking about leadership he focused on how simple it is to be a leader! That was such a great message for my kids. I think some kids feel that they could never be a leader of don't feel they have the qualities that it takes (yet) to be a leader. After hearing Nate's message, I think they realized that they ARE leaders already!! I also love that Nate said leaders are not always the loudest people in the room. I was able to share my own experience with that. My students know I am a quiet person and they were able to see that a lot of times leader do things that never get noticed, and thats OK!
The students had a challenge to be a leader in the classroom and in our school. If they had not have heard Nate's Message, it would have been really difficult for them to think of ways they could be a leader. But thanks to Nate, the challenge was really fun for the kids and they went above and beyond what was asked of them! We will continue to discuss ways for kids to be leaders in ways that feel comfortable to them. Thanks Nate for the great message and helping my kids realize they are ALL LEADERS!
The kids made Popplets to recreate the ways that they were leaders in the school or in the classroom. Of, course they had fun with creating them! Here are some examples:
Common core Standards addressed:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 3 topics and texts, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.1.A Come to discussions prepared, having read or studied required material; explicitly draw on that preparation and other information known about the topic to explore ideas under discussion.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.1.B Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., gaining the floor in respectful ways, listening to others with care, speaking one at a time about the topics and texts under discussion).
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.1.C Ask questions to check understanding of information presented, stay on topic, and link their comments to the remarks of others.
Leadership is such a powerful theme and often shows up in the most unexpected ways.
Our school ended up being one of the finalists for a MakerSpace and had to prepare a brief presentation to the foundation that was going to be awarding it. My principal approached me and my students and asked them (not even knowing about our Leadership theme for the month of March) to help out. We brainstormed and came up with an idea to create a mock Makerspace in an empty classroom. They researched and came up with a few different stations, woodworking, library, 3D Printer, crafting/sewing, technology, and circuitry. They then wrote scripts to perform when everyone walked in. I would go into more detail, but I could write a novel and I'm sure everyone is super busy...so if you wanna know the deets...just ask!
Well, we didn't get the Makerspace after all. Our school has several different STEM related clubs and the other school, they don't offer much so they felt they were more in need. They let us know that they had NEVER seen a presentation like that, led by students and were beyond impressed. I received a note from the foundation that we are on the list and "you never know what could come up in the future!" so that gives us hope that we left a lasting impression on them!
Through this, we found leaders in our room. I gave them very little direction and after each task, I asked them to think of who the leader was for the day. Each day was someone new. One name, Nomia, came up over and over again. I was kind of shocked as Nomia is extremely and sometimes frighteningly shy. But like +Alex Rigsby mentioned, leaders aren't always loud. They complimented Nomia on her quiet leadership and how she respected each person and included everyone's ideas in the project. She made sure everyone was heard and participated without being bossy.
Later, I asked them what leadership looked like and they created posters. Again, keeping in mind who led the project. We read about leaders and read quotes on leadership. I asked them to pick one quote that really stuck out to them and why and add it to our Google Form. I took their pictures on picture day (no uniforms and fancy lookin' kids!) and as a surprise, I had their pictures printed with their quotes on them. I put them in frames and as they walked in they were on their desks. It was pretty awesome to see their faces (Watch the video and you'll see what I'm talking about!)
As we wrapped up, I asked them to think of the various tasks that they had been charged with. I sent out another Google Form asking them to nominate someone who demonstrated leadership this year. I printed out certificates and we had a little ceremony. Many of the kids who were nominated, didn't think they were leaders at all. However, when I read to them what the other students wrote about them there were a lot of smiles and a few tears. It was pretty awesome!
I'm attaching the video and some of the things the kiddos wrote about their classmates as leaders! Enjoy!
"How Antonio shows leadership is by being nice and how he is respectful to others. You can also trust him and count on him. Antonio will not let down so you can ask him to do something and he'll do it and he'll also help you do anything. Those are some reasons Antonio is a great leader" "Nomia showed leadership when we were making our leadership posters she helped us out with an amazing idea, and not only that she made sure that everyone was doing something that they were good at and that they were having fun and doing something good for the poster."
First graders have a different idea of leadership. Before watching our mentor +Nate Hinze video on leadership, I asked the children to define the word. The first responses were being a leader. I then reminded them that they couldn't use the word or part of the word they were defining in the definition. There was a long pause in my room before one child raised his hand and said leadership meant being first, like our line leader. Once the students' heard his idea, they caught on. Hands went up all over our meeting rug. Answers ranged from "being in front of the room" to "being the boss" and "telling everybody what to do".
After all that wished to had told their definition of leadership, we watched +Nate Hinze's video. He did an excellent job of explaining leadership in little kid friendly terms. He also pointed out several ways my first graders could and do show leadership at school. My students were so excited by the examples that we had to stop the video a few times due to kids shouting out, "I do that!"
When the video finished, I gave examples of behaviors and the students had to tell me whether the child in the example was showing leadership. They had no problem telling me which were leadership. Unfortunately, showing leadership was much harder.
Most of them started with the examples from the video, which was great. The problem was that like most first graders, they didn't think their actions through. They got the action but didn't quite get the timing. We would be in the middle of a lesson and a child would notice pencils needed to be sharpened, so he/she would get up and go to sharpen them. In other cases they would try to help someone with reading or a math fact, but their way to help was to either tell them the answer, write or read it for them, or make a not nice comment while they were helping.
It took re-watching the video several times as well as multiple reminders but my kiddos finally understood what leadership entailed and that it wasn't about being first or bossing people around. I now have a roomful of proud leaders in my class who are more than happy to tell everyone they see how they are leaders.
As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.
Click to view the Healthy Living Planning MeetingRecording and view thePDF slides from the Healthy Living planning meeting.
Click herefor this month's family newsletter in English andhere for the newsletter in Spanish.
Click herefor the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Healthy Living from pages 21-24!
This month's video lesson may contain several big points: What Healthy Living embodies:
Nutrition and hydration
Sleep
Exercise
Saying no to underage drinking
For olders: Body image
Exploring Healthy Living:
Vocabulary
Digging into what Healthy Living embodies
Healthy Living in Action
Healthy Living on the Page
For your own learning
A challenge to the students that may include:
Set a short term goal regarding a healthy choice with nutrition, sleep, or activity level.
Involve their families in making a healthy choice with them -- trying a new physical activity together, trying a new fruit or vegetable, getting to bed a little earlier, or talking about underage drinking. Each student might be asked to report back to the class about how it went.
You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:
Planning for vocabulary development as needed
Preparing a Frayer model to make Healthy Living more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Healthy Living. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.
There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.
Vocabulary Development
Healthy Living is a big contributing factor in how well your brain learns. This vocabulary may not be new for your students but this can be an opportunity to help them find ways to make it relevant in their lives and to include their family and friends as they explore ways to engage with healthy living in their daily lives.
You can also look into some quotes about health from Brainy Quotes. Be careful with quote collections around health! Many meme collections are more along the line of promoting unhealthy habits, like exercising so a person deserves to eat. Scary stuff.
How to Engage in Healthy Living:
Healthy Living is a choice that is made multiple times every day, be mindful of the resources students in your community have access to when exploring viable options for a healthier lifestyle. As noted above, despite access to certain resources, once of the basics of Healthy Living is the ability to make good decisions.
It is very helpful to learn how to read labels and have awareness about the ingredients in your food. This can be highlighted in core subjects such as Math for calorie counting or tracking their healthy food choices and creating a class chart. Defining the lengthy food names can make for an enlightening activity, including exploring where they originate in the world and their processing journey. Here is a link to an article with 10 different documentaries about how food is processed, you are the expert on your students to know how to present any documentary in regards to this information.
Ella Maya suggests writing a "healthy cookbook", which she did for her challenge! It included writing and math skills as they worked step by step through the process of creating several recipes.
Food deserts is a concept that may be new for your students to explore in regards to access for healthy food choices. Here is a link to explore the definitions of what a food desert is and a Food desert locator for the states.
The links below include websites with more information about meal planning and food access in both the US and CAN:
Choose My Plate – MyPlate illustrates the five food groups that are the building blocks for a healthy diet using a familiar image - a place setting for a meal. Before you eat, think about what goes in your plate, in your cup, or in your bowl.
The US Department of Agriculture’s website explains their efforts to improve and enhance the school food environment
Health Canada: A great website that allows you to create your own food guide with your students, providing resources for educators and also includes a food guide for First Nations, Inuit, and Metis populations.
Daily Mail Article:What school lunches look like around the world (scroll past big zombie banner ad at the top prior to making screen live for kids) Here'sanother linkto an article about this via BuzzFeed (no zombies, but less explanation).
Hungry Planet A photo book about who eats what and where. Food as cultural exchange might be a nice way to integrate nutrition and social studies.
The Sandwich Swap was recommended by a teacher during our planning meeting.
Several extension services or farmers markets that offer monthly tastings in the schools. Please do a search for this in your geographic area.The Food Trust in the Camden, NJ area is an example of one such program.
Up to 60% of water makes up the human body and the world is made up of 71%. As warmer weather approaches with summer having access to water becomes more important as we continue to make healthy choices. CamelBak has a Hydration Calculator that will help you and your students to determine your ideal level of hydration as you engage in physical activity.
This is also a good time to explore with your students the impacts of climate change on water sources. The United Stated Environmental Protection Agency provides more information on this websitewith information about the water cycle, water quality, demands and more!
It would be a fun to engage your students in a service project around clean water for May in our We Are Champions month. Here is a link to several facts about clean water, from the nonprofitwater.org, co-founded by the adorable Matt Damon, that works to create access to clean water for the global community.
Sleep
Another sleepless night! Oh, how that alarm clock becomes our enemy and the day drags out till we can return to bed. School-aged children need 10 hours of sleep per night. Only 59% of kids grades 6-8 are getting that. –American Academy of Pediatrics survey.
Are your families unsure just how much sleep their children need to be functional students in school. This is an article for parents about sleep from the New York TimesZombie Prevention: You Child’s Sleep and an article from the Huffington Post about the 5 Scary Health Effects of Sleep Deprivation During the Teen Years which discusses how lack of sleep can cause issues with mental health, learning, and behavioral troubles and offers tips for what parents can do.
There is also a link to a video about how sleep deprivation is linked to emotional regulation and mental health conditions.
Exercise
It’s important to incorporate fun and play into exercise! Exercise helps students improve the quality of their sleep, aids in the development of important interpersonal skills due to participation needed in team sports. Kids who exercise also have greater self-esteem and better self-images and it can help take the mind off the sore muscles :)
As a way to reintegrate Fair Play into Healthy Living can be to led or have students lead, stretching exercises together as a class to help build motivation. The Colorado Education Initiative has put together a Teacher Toolbox for Physical Activity Breaks in the Secondary Classroom. Mary Elizabeth Moran shared a link to some great resources about healthy snacks and daily physical activity for students, and Ella Maya shared a link with an example of the POUND workout!
Even when the weather is extreme and outdoor play is difficult Playworks.org is a free, searchable library of indoor and outdoor recess games. You can filter these options by age, time limit, location, and equipment.
To extend your excellent work from Community in November and December you can engage your school community with theLet's Move: Active Schoolscampaign which has resources to make systemic change in schools with options to include more physical activity, gardening, drinking milk, and making good food choices.
For more context and educational resources in regards, to the importance of exercise see the link to articles and organizations:
An article from Huffington Post which is recommended by our Athlete Mentor Coordinator, Andy Reimer about how exercise changed a neuroscientist’s life.
Here is a link to the policy statement on the importance of recess and free play from the Christian Science Monitor summarized by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
You know your community and your students the best, many Athlete Mentors will talk about topics like saying no to drinking or drugs, we suggest watching the video before sharing it with your students to help you to navigate this topic as you see fit.
Ask, Listen, Learnis a site with an abundance of free resources where you can find the vocabulary to parts of the brain and nervous system that are affected by underage drinking on the growing brain. There are also several resources including interactive games, free lessons and so much more! Here is also alink to an animated video that comes to us from Missouri Safe & Sober, about alcohol's effect on the teenage brain.
The Truth, a teacher recommended website is a site to help end smoking by sharing the effects with its audience. This is recommended for grade seven and up. Talk: They hear you campaign is related to avoid unhealthy substances is the conversation about tobacco use, and especially e- cigarettes or vaping that seems to have a marketing approach aimed at children.
For olders: Body image Please know your community before exploring these resources. Some ideas about body image were requested by some of our middle school teachers last year.
Tread carefully on health quotes online. Many are disguised pro-eating disorder or encourage super unrealistic body images, often called Fitspo. If you have older students who might be looking at these unrealistic memes online, Buzzfeed did a really funny talk back to them. Find ithere. Learn why Fitspo is dangerous in thisHuffington Post article.
You might be familiar with Dove's Real Beauty campaign, six-minute videohere about a forensic artist who makes drawings of people based on their own overly critical descriptions. Orthis one, where women chose between a door that labels them beautiful or not.
Here is also a round-up of body positive social media campaigns to help kicks tart the conversation, and an article about the thigh gap trend in female teens, and why it has to stop from The Mercury News site.
Not only women struggle with body image, this photo project shows that "ideal" male bodies are really culturally specific, a link to an honest article from a man about poor body image, andreactions to that article curated by him afterward all provided by Huffington Post.
Healthy Living in Action
This is a great time to start a new or extend upon any service projects started in your school community during the month of March for Leadership! Kids might take the time to interview some adults in their life about how the adults make healthy meals and why they make those good choices. If you have a school lunch staff, you might invite them in to say hello and talk about how they prepare food for the students. How about an instructional video about a fun playground game or a brain break in class? Other classes could take a look and write back on how it went.
GoNoodle is a website providing videos that guide students to fun physical activities designed with K-5 classrooms in mind. It comes highly recommended from our teachers and is free with some body shaking fun! Kate recommends her personal favorite, Koo Too Kanga Roo!
This is also a good time to think about foods that connect the global community. Is there a food item that most cultures enjoy? The series Cooked on Netflix is excellent at looking at how the elements of Fire, Water, Air & Earth are incorporated in food around the world. See the trailer here.
Want to make bread in a bag! Norm Wong recommends this recipe to make this simple and delicious homemade bread.
Healthy Living on the Page:
Consider the stories and novels you have already covered to analyze books and stories you have read this year. Are there any characters that struggled with making healthy choices? Can you identify any of their actions steps to make better choices?
The Lunch Lady books are about a head lunchroom cook who takes on crime with spy gadgets including a super spatula.
Chew on this: Facts you don’t want to know about fast foodis the teen companion to the book and movieFast Food Nation which talks about how kids love fast food and how the fast food industry definitely loves kids. It couldn’t survive without them. Check out the book reviewhere from the New York Times.
Betty Crocker Kid’s Cookbook comes to us with by way of Heatherle and she recommends the Elvis-themed banana smoothie and the chili! This book includes over 60 simple recipes to show you how to fix every meal of the day plus snacks and desserts.
Here is a link to a foodiebooklist that offers a wide variety of recommended books from our teachers for the littles.
Many of our CC teachers, especially Warren Moody in Alberta CAN grade 7-8, have invited families to send in a photo or note about one thing they did over HL month together: cooking, a walk, everyone buckled up in the car, etc. as a homework assignment. Families have said it really motivated them to think about how they are talking about HL with their kids.
Laureen and Myrna share a link to HealthyU cookbooks are great for families in Alberta Canada, Portion Size kits are useful and easy for kids to relate to. Some kits can be borrowed for your school for several weeks, like sugar and fat content with visuals.
Coming to us from Lisa Whitworth is the book Who Grew My Soup? Which tells the story of young Phineas Quinn and his questions about the vegetable soup his mom serves for lunch.
For Your Learning:
As we talk about Healthy Living for our students it is just as important that we talk it for ourselves. How do we take care of ourselves as teachers so we can continue to inspire every day?
Some resources that members of our staff enjoy are:
With testing coming around finding time for quiet brain breathing can really help: Headspace as a nice Healthy Living app that might get folks through the testing season.
If you are like us, sometime at night the task list can start, and an app Relaxing Melodies brings ambient sounds that you can mix and match really tailoring it to your needs.
Sadly with each passing day we get a bit older; here is a link to an article about how to eat wisely as we age.
A short article on 7 great tips to help handle stress in the workplace like including Omega-3 fats in your diet helps reduce stress and boost mood and looking for the humor in what seems to be a bad situation.
NPR article that acknowledges how difficult teaching is.
Starling is an app, recommended by Martina McQuire, which takes you through strategies and resources of guided meditations and mindfulness.
For more information about healthy living see below!
Athletes also struggle with mental health conditions that can affect their ability to play to their best ability. The Mighty newsletter has an article with seven inspiring quotes from athletes who live with mental healthy conditions and how they are able to manage to be able to continue in their journey.
Drop Dead Healthy: One man's humble quest for bodily perfection(Goodreads) Write AJ Jacobs is known for documenting his experiments in learning projects (like reading the entire encyclopedia in a year, or living according to various interpretations of Biblical law for a year). In this book, Jacobs tackles everything from diet trends to alternative toilet seats. Laugh out loud funny in parts. Related TED Talk "How Living Healthy Almost Killed Me" here.
A US government produced a film from the 1950s about healthy eating. Ralph is a picky eater, and the soundtrack clearly has an opinion about that (cue villain music). Ralph has no pep.
Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution is acookbook (a really good one), a movement, and was a tv show briefly. He rails against the fact that few people know how to cook anymore (especially low-income people) and that American school lunches are worse than prison food. Twenty-one minute TED talkhere. Pardon his swearing. He's English and admits that he is ranting because he is so upset.
NPR did an interesting story about cooking classes for English Language Learner adults, which is a really innovative way to connect culture and language.Link here.
Fresh Air Podcast episodeCreamed, Canned and Frozen: How The Great Depression revamped U.S. Diets covers how culinary historians Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe discuss how "The Great Depression was a time when Americans had food front and foremost in their minds and were worrying about it every day."
