Continuing on with our lessons about RESPECT, my class moved on to Empathy.  For those of you following along, this lesson went with the "E" in Digital Divide and Conquer's RESPECT posters.  I began by showing the students this Sesame Street video defining Empathy.  Let's face it, empathy is a hard word to understand and Sesame Street has a knack for breaking hard concepts down for kids.  I will admit, when I first projected this up, there were several groans from my fifth graders.  But by the end of the video, they were laughing and fully into it.  Plus, they understood Empathy :) Once we had a good working definition of what it means to be empathetic, I walked them through the five steps towards showing empathy in any given situation.  I got these steps from this lesson here , and I thought they were just perfect for breaking down the process we go through when putting ourselves in another person's shoes. I then broke the students into groups of 4....
One of the shifts we have tried to make using Common Core is incorporating real world problems into all aspects of our curriculum.  When I was first introduced to this idea that everything I was teaching needed to be totally different, that it had to be SO much more rigorous and SO much more difficult, I had a mild heart attack.  I thought things were going along pretty good.  And, really, they kind of were.  I just needed to tweak a bit.   Now, what I am about to share with you is probably something you have done many, many times before.  However, what I am finding with my own teaching is that looking at activities that I have done in the past with a new lens is causing me to shift just slightly and make the work a bit more rigorous.  It really isn't taking a lot of work on my part, just a different perspective. In class, we have been working on adding and subtracting decimals.  I wanted to break out my tried and true Book Order Math project that I have done in the past (c...
The second aspect of respect that we touched upon in class was THINKING before you speak.  Using the letter S from Digital Divide and Conquer's awesome Respect Posters , I gathered my students on the rug to discuss the idea of THINKing before we speak. You know those signs that are all over Pinterest using the acronym THINK?  Here are a few examples of them .  Anyway, I used that acronym to design my lesson.  The purpose was to force the students to think about the words that were coming out of their mouths and how they were perceived by other people. First, I wrote THINK on the chart paper, leaving a bit of space between them.  I went through, letter by letter, telling the students what it meant, then giving examples of times when they probably went against that trait, but also examples of how they could exemplify it.  For example, T = True.  Is what you are saying actually true, or are you just giving your opinion?  When you call someone ugly, is that true?  If you ask that p...