New Uses for Sown to Grow

Using Sown to Grow in class has been popular with my students.  In a class vote, they preferred Sown to Grow 20/23 students for tracking math facts and Raz Kids data.

Last week we expanded the use of the website to 2 new applications.  Students are now tracking their writing score on paragraphs.  When they meet with me to discuss their writing they enter the rubric grade they've received.  Based on our conversation they also add a note about 1 thing they can do better in their next writing.  For example, they might need to capitalize sentences, add a topic sentence, turn fragments into complete sentences, or add more varied verbs.  Before they write the next assignment they check Sown to Grow to see their specific goal.

Also, students are tracking kindness.  Each Friday they will either mark "completed" or "not completed" as their status (hopefully never the latter).  In the notes they will describe one specific act of kindness from the week.

Speaking of which, The Great Kindness Challenge starts Monday.  Find more information here.  My class was lucky enough to have Melissa Dyrdahl from Ella Health visit a few weeks ago to talk to students about kindness has impacted her career and they shared their thoughts about kindness with her.

Growth Mindset Lesson

Classdojo has created a series of 5 short videos to teach students about growth mindset.  The videos use the Classdojo characters.  The first video is available and the rest will be released once a week.

You can find the first video here.

My students enjoyed watching chapter 1.  The video is about 2 1/2 minutes and gives a specific example of growth/fixed mindset without being heavy-handed in the message delivery.

After watching the video my students paired up and interviewed each other using the iPad camera (so I haven't included samples).  They worked as a whole class to create 3 questions they though were most relevant to the video.  The directions I gave them were to create questions that would show me they understood the video's message and could relate it to themselves.  We arrived at 3 questions after brainstorming a list of ideas and then voting.

The final questions...

1.  Explain a time when you had to exercise your brain.  Give specific details and tell how you felt.

2.  Give Mojo some advise.  What are 1 or 2 specific things he could do to help him understand math better (pretend he is having trouble with the subtraction regrouping we're learning now).

3.  Who do you think is correct about being smart, Mojo or Katie and why?