HAPPY FIRST DAY!

It was a smooth transition into the new year at the Ecoschoolhouse.  I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with these fantastic individuals and starting our class community.  The picture below is all of us on Day 1 holding up our cube structures.

We are starting the year based on the theme of "The World is Your Classroom!".  Highlights of the day included kids sharing their self reflecting cube structures, taking a class tour, organizing materials, starting All-Star posters, and gearing up for our community experiences.  Part of our preparation for getting out into the community and getting inspired by our environment includes learning about ourselves and what inspires us.  So we are doing quite a few introspective "get to know you" activities and today we also started a SIMPLE family tree that kids will share tomorrow.  The intention is we will see even in our classroom of 28 learners we represent a wide variety of community and culture. I included an example below with some very simple expectations:

1. Ask your family for help
2. Include at least mother/father, grandmother/grandfather
3. Do your best to include place of birth and date

Above those expectations, include what you would like, especially since families come in all shapes and sizes and can mean different things to different people.  This is not an assignment we will grade; it is meant just for kids to learn something new about where they came from.  Let me know if you have any questions.

Also, while sharing about myself and my love of baseball, we viewed Lou Gehrig's famous farewell speech in which he addresses being "the luckiest man on the face of the planet" despite having a terminal illness.  In his speech, he addresses his appreciation of family and his community in his success.  We followed this up with another movie about a modern man who has the same terminal illness, ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, devoting the rest of his life to making the world a better place with acts of kindness. I attached links to those movies below.  The videos are intended to set the stage for students understanding how community affects who they are and this year we are planning to be inspired to work on a project to make the world a better place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl8R_9pCaDE

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/07/lou-gehrig-speech-75th-anniversary-mlb-new-york-yankees

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/als-patient-devotes-life-to-random-acts-of-kindness/