Conscious Discipline + New Units + Schedule Update

 A few weeks ago I had a classic teacher moment. Our school had a pajamas and reading day, and I brought in some cookies for an afternoon snack for the kids to enjoy during our reading time. (Actually my fantastic team teacher brought the cookies for both of our classes - she's the best) Anyway, I put out the cookies and a) very few kids said thank you, b) a few kids complained about how many cookies they got, and c) I lowkey lost it. Bandwidth for all of us tends to be a little low on a Friday afternoon anyway, but I heard myself lecturing and fussing and saw the kids deflating and I just thought ... this isn't it.

So, over that weekend, I did a bunch of reading and thinking, and ended up purchasing Conscious Discipline by Becky Bailey. I've been implementing a lot of the elements of the program, and so far I really like it! In particular I like the "Brain Smart Start" and Wishing Well routines, and her frameworks for assertiveness and encouragement have been so helpful. I created some visuals using ChatGPT and I think it's making a significant difference in our class culture and especially for some of us who struggle a little more with consistent regulation.



In other news, we are starting our unit on Neurodiversity on Monday! We decided to change up our schedule a bit so that we'll have separate Reading and Project Based Learning blocks. For this unit Reading and Writing will be self-paced and mastery based using the Modern Classrooms Model that we have been implementing in math. We are running a unit from Fishtank on The Wild Book, and I'm really excited about it! In PBL students will be researching Neurodiversity and creating a fourth grade website answering the question: "How can understanding neurodiversity help everyone feel seen and valued?" The idea is that they will work in teams to research things like ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, OCD, and Tourettes. For each form of neurodiversity they will do some informational writing and include book reviews of middle grades novels or short stories that feature neurodiverse characters. I'm really excited about it!




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