The Final Days Of Learning About Citizenship

I'm trying to make a schedule to remind myself to blog, we will see how that goes.  I'm impressed that this is my second blog post for the week!  The past two days we were working on finishing the reading/informational part of our LDC module.  Next week, my students will begin working on their reports.  This is kind of scary to thing about, we have been in school for 29 days and we are going to attempt to write and possibly type a report!  Thinking positive, happy thoughts!!

On Thursday, I had my students complete one more activity for Random Acts of Kindness.  When they arrived at school, I had 2 post-it notes waiting for them on their desks.  They were to write two different random acts of kindness that they could perform.  There were many cute ideas posted to our chart!  We are also going to keep a chart "Our Random Acts of Kindness!" in our classroom.  Each time a student does a random act of kindness, they will get to write their name and what their random act of kindness was and post it on our chart.  We are up to two random acts of kindness, hoping to get a few more each week!

Our word of the day for Thursday was good listener.  This is a citizenship trait that my students selected.  This is something that a handful of my students have a hard time doing.  This year, I have a very chatty bunch of students. We had a long discussion on ways that we can show that we can be a good listener.  It is amazing that they can recite all of things that they are suppose to be doing at school but have difficulty actually doing it!

On Friday, we completed the last two words in our citizenship journal.  I was suppose to start explaining and having my students start the writing process but knew that this was going to be difficult to do on a Friday.  Plus, I didn't want to have to reteach the same writing lesson on Monday, I could already hear them saying "What are we suppose to do?".  Our first word of the day was loyalty.  I have found many amazing citizenship books at the local library, this has made it much easier to explain each word of the day to my students.  The main idea that my students understood about loyalty was that you care for your friends and family when they need you.  Since this was our last day of journal writing, I decided to get all of them in a picture!  

Our final citizenship word was fairness.  To help my students understand about fairness, I gave two of my students tootsie rolls.  One of my students only received 1 tootsie roll, the other student received 5.  I had my students discuss if this was fair or not fair and why.  They all thought that it was not fair and that the student who had 5 tootsie rolls had to give back 4 of them.  We then proceeded to write in our journals for the last time.

I am a little scared about starting such a big writing piece with them next week.  I feel that they will have a great start to writing an excellent report based on the pages that they completed in their journals!  I think that I have finally made up my mind as to how I'm going to have my students write their reports.  I am going to start them out writing about why they think that good citizenship is important to their community.  Then they will have to pick out between 3-5 words and write a paragraph about each word.  I'm thinking that our paragraphs are only going to be 3 sentences, which is something that the majority of my students can do.  Then we will work on our closing paragraph.  This process is going to take a lot of time and effort from both my students and myself.  I cannot wait to share this writing experience and my reflection of this entire module with you!  

Have a great rest of your weekend!
Amber