Brain Science and Remembrance Day

Once again I am finding myself with VERY little time to take care of my blog. I miss blogging a lot but I am swamped with my master’s work and running my son around to soccer. Maybe someday I will have a laptop and then I can blog while I am being soccer mom 3 days a week! Wouldn’t that be great???? Three blog posts a week. I would be happy if I could get one post every 2 weeks.

Anyways, I have a few spare moments so I thought I would let you know some of the things I used in my classroom this week.

My master’s action research project is all about goal setting and students taking ownership for their learning. So far my class has completed the first 6 weeks of my data collecting with no goal setting and this week we had our transition week where I taught them about creating SMART goals. I found a unit on TpT which was almost perfect for what I needed. It has posters and practice activities for creating SMART goals. You can find it here but take note that the meaning she wrote for the R is reason when everything else has it as realistic or relevant. I have emailed to ask for her to include a realistic or relevant poster as well. She quickly got back to me and said she was going to work on one!

In science we are learning about the human body and we started with the nervous system. My students are loving it! We completed an experiment to see if the brain can learn where students had to be timed completing a 25 piece puzzle. They did the puzzle 4 times and then looked at their time results. Every student but one, had bettered their time. With their partner they discussed what they thought this meant about their brain (that it can learn, that it can memorize things, that it works faster by remembering things if you do them over an over again). We then had a class talk about how this related to school (the more you practice things the better you will remember them). They had so much fun they wanted to be timed doing EVERY puzzle I had.

Continuing with the brain, we watched the video below and then students worked in groups of 3 to create a poster that showed what they learned about the brain. The title of the posters are, How Our Brains Learn. They are still working on the posters but I will be sure to post pictures when they are done because some of them are very creative.

When we went to watch the YouTube video the computer was acting up and would not download the video quick enough. After being frustrated I called another teacher who showed me how to download the video to my computer and then put it in a Smartboard file so we didn’t have to wait for it to download each time! This is now how I will be showing most of my YouTube clips to my students!

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada so we had our school assembly on Friday. It was a short assembly and there were no videos shown. I find that students are really impacted by the videos so I wanted to show them a couple. Here is one:

During snack time I read my students A Bear in War by Stephanie Innes. One student was so moved that she began to cry because she said she was thinking of her great-grandpa.

Before I go I want to share with you a picture I found on Pinterest. Sorry I cannot remember exactly where I found it but when I did I immediately grabbed it and printed it off. I have to remind myself every once in a while when I am feeling overwhelmed with the responsibilities of being a teacher that someone is trusting me with their most precious gift and it is an honor.