Everyone's Smart

Well, I've successfully survived one week and two days with my kids!

Some of them are going to keep me on my toes, but I think I have a pretty good class (Even the toe keepers!)! :)

Each year, I always work  to build a classroom community/family (you can see how I do it through Responsive Classroom), and this year, I added in something that I learned from my Learn Like a Pirate book study.

Paul calls it Marble Theory, a way to show how everyone is smart, but we did it with base ten rods in my room (because I had enough for everyone, and they were already prepackaged in sets!)

Before we started, I had the kids brainstorm a list of things they could be 'smart' about.

Then, I passed our four cups, and a bag of 20 base ten rods to every student.

They needed to write two things they felt really 'smart' about, and two things they didn't feel as 'smart' about.

I showed them how to divided up their base tens blocks-more blocks go into the ones they are 'smart' about, with less blocks going into the 'not as smart' cups.

Once everyone had picked their things and divided up their rods, we took a gallery walk around the room, to see what they had. (And it was one of the quietest gallery walks ever! :)

Then, I had them come back and write the same thing for their cups (Reading & Writing, Math, Science, Social Studies) and had them reallocate their rods.

We took another gallery walk (another super quiet one!) to see our results.

After we had cleaned up, we talked about how different people have different levels of 'smarts' for everything that we do-but that we all had the same amount of smarts to start with.

We said it together a few times-we're all the same amount of smart-just in different ways. This led into my 'easy' discussion, how we don't use that words, because what one person finds easy, another one may find hard. That's because their 'smarts' are in a different area.

This then led into a discussion about even though it is hard, we need to keep trying and persevere, and change our mindset, and led to use starting this chart (which I pinned from Runde's Room, but came from Fieldcrest Elementary - please pin it from the source if you are going to pin it)
We're not quite done with the chart-we ran out of time-but we'll continue to work on it and it will be posted in our room to refer to.

So far, so good! I think the kids definitely enjoyed it, and hopefully we did an activity that I can refer back to all year long when we forget that we're all the same amount of smart.

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn