Miscellaneous:

Habits + Attitudes = Habitudes

Self-awareness is the ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior. This includes accurately assessing one’s strengths and limitations and possessing a well-grounded sense of confidence and optimism. While there are a lot of facets to self-awareness, we specifically learned about the discipline of recognizing personal strengths using the metaphor of the Golden Buddha.

Habitudes are images that form leadership habits and attitudes, and the image of the Golden Buddha represents your student’s ability to recognize their personal strengths to gain self-awareness.

Recognizing strengths is the ability to identify or acknowledge the existence of one’s own positive qualities and gifts in order to develop confidence and optimism. The golden buddha was hidden beneath a concrete facade, and people did not see the true value of the statue until they looked within. In the same way, students must look inside themselves to recognize their strengths in order to become self-aware and see their true value.

Through this lesson, we challenged your child to think through some difficult questions—How can you help someone else find the “gold” inside? What are some things you can do this week to encourage someone who does not see their gifts?

This year for our Fall Celebrations we are looking forward to having parties in our classrooms, much like years past.  This year will be slightly different, in a couple of ways.

1. Parents and volunteers will not be able to attend.  (We will miss you!)
2. While we will have some snacks, I will be providing some allergy safe and prepackaged options.
3. Games, crafts, and snacks need to be sent in 24 hours in advance (or more).

Like previous years, we will be welcoming your children to wear costumes, if they wish.  One change this year is that children will be able to wear their costumes to school and wear them the whole day.  The intent behind this is to limit children gathering in the restrooms to change, and limit the number of children needing assistance from teachers and staff to get into their costumes.  We invite you to send your children in a costume that includes no weapons or gore, and easily allows your child to participate in regular school routines and procedures.  There will not be any masks other than COVID-19-related facemasks allowed. There will not be time given to dress or apply makeup as in years past.

Please consider the questions below when deciding on a costume:

• Can they take it off themselves to use the bathroom?
• Can they fit in their seat at their desk?
• Can they go down the slide or sit in the swings?

We ask that you save bulky, inflatable, or extravagant costumes for home use, and dress in a fun and simple costume for the school day.  Fall or pumpkin t-shirts are a great alternative as well.

My plan is to weave in festive activities and embrace the fun throughout the day.  We are thrilled at the opportunity to celebrate with your children and look forward to creating another fun and memorable school event for them.

S.O.A.R. Kickoff!

This week, we launched our PBIS OUTSTANDING TICKETS. Students went on a TOP SECRET MISSION to find two SOAR agents! The scavenger hunt ended back in our classroom with students needing to find an Outstanding taped underneath a table. When individuals or the whole class earns an Outstanding ticket for excellent behavior or SOARing in some way, everyone benefits! We’ll celebrate when we reach a total of 20 Outstandings!

Writer’s Workshop: Making Some Revision Decisions!

I writing, we’ve been working on a lot of pre-writing skills, including writing some stellar sentences! We’ve used the DRAFT mnemonic device to build a skillset to help us as writers. This week, we’ve tried some digital workshop strategies and utilized Google Classroom to collaborate and share our work!