This week the students in grades five and six participated in team building exercises using Challenge Tarps. Challenge Tarps are a great way for students to work on solving specific tasks as a unit while helping to build the following skills: 1. Cooperation - working together with a group for there to be success. 2. Out of the box thinking - all solutions are correct. 3. Listening - solutions can only be found with properly understanding the explanation of the task. 4. Thinking - the groups need to think, then solve the problem, not just react to find a quick solution. 5. Communication - finding effective ways to communicate with each other. 6. Role recognition - who are the leaders, the followers, the listeners, the thinkers, the peacemakers, etc. The students enjoyed the challenges, and were able to reflect on their successes and opportunities to improve afterwards.
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Dr. George Stanley’s Physically Active Living (PAL) program is designed to focus on well-ness education, to ensure that our students can achieve success in all parts of life, not just the classroom!
The new fee attached to this course for every student in grades 4-9 will cover the cost of bringing in experts to our school, field trip costs, which include transportation, and the cost of the activity. As well, the students will be involved in making healthy food preparations several times throughout the year. As we approach the time of year when our students begin thinking about their SMART goals, it seemed fitting to explore the ideas of growth and fixed mindsets. Mindset is a simple idea discovered by world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck in decades of research on achievement and success—a simple idea that makes all the difference. In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities. This week the students at DGS have been engaged in conversations and activities, helping them to discover how they can be affected by their own changing mindsets, and how a growth mindset helps to enhance relationships, motivate themselves and others, and to create productivity in the worlds of business, education and sports. The following is a link for the growth mindset activity done in class this week for the grade 5-9 PAL students: http://blog.classcreator.io/teaching-kids-to-struggle-growthmindset/ I am extremely eager to be involved in a program that is designed to focus on
well-ness education, to ensure that our students can achieve success in all parts of life, not just the classroom! Below is a model that visually represents concepts that will be explored throughout the year. |