GT at Hidden Forest

This blog post is brought to you by Aubrie. We will have one more blog post (hopefully later this week) sharing the Thinglinks and videos students created for their Character Trait Floorplans.)

Today was our last day in G.T., and we were very busy doing an array of activities.

We created slideshows about the meaning of G.T. using quotes we found on Pinterest, and presented them to the class. We were also able to add music and pictures.

We connected to a new group on Edmodo that is just for 5th graders that are going to middle school. This way, we can still talk about G.T. and other related topics.

Mrs. Eichholz got a sphero with the great big check she got for being an *amazing* teacher, and we all got a packet of papers about how to use the sphero. We had to complete a challenging challenge with with the sphero: programming it to follow our instructions. If we correctly programmed it, we got to do Maker’s Studio.

We also did our report card self-assesments, where we rate ourselves on various things, like working well with others.

Lastly, we watched two videos, *(attached below)* one about Kid President and another one about kindness.

Have a great summer!

A Pep Talk from Kid President to You – YouTube

Life Vest Inside – Kindness Boomerang – “One Day” – YouTube

Yesterday, the 3rd grade students presented their proposals for ways to help with noise and messiness in the cafeteria. They based their ideas on research they had done, including interviews with principals from other schools (Mr. Gustafson and Mr. Gilpin). Mrs. Jessop and our “Principal for the Day,” James Allen were the audience for the presentations.

Anna presented a board game that she made that could be played to reinforce cafeteria behavior. She made one game set for each grade level that includes the directions and game cards. Classes on the grade level could pass the game to each other when they are finished.

Roman created a video game using Gamestar Mechanic. It also reinforces cafeteria behavior with questions about appropriate ways to act when in the lunch room. His vision is for the link to be available on the student shares drive, and students who have teacher permission can play the game when they come to the library.

Timothy and Katie were very motivated to use movies as an incentive for good behavior in the cafeteria. They used an app called Touchcast, which allowed them to use a green screen and add some special effects – including a live, intereactive poll – into their video trying to persuade administrators to use this idea. (We had a few issues with the app, as you can see from Timothy’s floating head in the photo below, but it finally worked out!) They were careful to look at the idea from many perspectives, and included these in their video.

As a class, the students also liked the idea of engaging student leaders to help out in the cafeteria. Since we are a Leader in Me school, this seemed like it would fit in well with our school goals. The class worked together to come up with a vision for how this would happen, and Timothy and Katie put the ideas together into an Adobe Voice presentation.

Mrs. Jessop said that she would share these ideas with the other administrators, and we will hopefully be able to implement some of them next year.