Maze Runner, the Gym Game

I watched "The Maze Runner" last week, and followed that up by reading the first 2 books of the series.  I was on the way to PE and had the idea that the idea of the Maze could really be fun for the students experience the movie through play.

The Setup:

1. Create the maze:  This is the most difficult part.  For my maze, I used 2 standing crash mats to mark out the "Safe" area where the Runners live.  I used every available tumbling mat, bench, and hockey net to set up a maze that had multiple paths.

2. Create the objectives: I used little foam dodgeball and scattered them around for the runners to find.

3. Get scooters out: you need enough for half of the students to scoot around on.

4. Divide the students into 2 even groups.  One group is the Runners, and one is the Grievers.

The Rules:

1. The Runners must try and get as many balls from the maze as possible.

2. The Grievers will scoot around and try and tag them "out".  Grievers are not allowed in the safe zone.

3. The Runners may not make contact with the Maze in any form - no knocking over walls, moving objects. If they do they are "out"

4. The Runners may not step or jump over any benches, if they do they are "out".  This is the rule to watch most from a safety concern.  Students will easily trip when jumping and chasing each other.  Plus, the maze becomes trivial when benches are ignored. 

5. The Grievers must be seated on the scooters at all times.  This keeps their speed down and engages their core more.  It's more exercise and safer.

6. After a pre-arranged time (1 minute, 2 minutes) switch teams.  Anyone who got "out" is back in the game.

What I Get To Do:

I keep track of the rules.  I also get to alter the maze.  

When I see that the Runners are using a path a lot to leave the safe zone, I move obstacles to trap them outside, and force them to take longer paths back into the safe zone.  If I see that the Grievers are "guarding" an entrance, I open up a new one and close the old one, so the Grievers need to find a different location.

The Results:

Both teams had a lot of fun and were very active.  This was enjoyable whether or not the students had seen the movie.

Grievers had to work together to get out the Runners, and the Runners had to keep track of maze movements and plan out their routes constantly.  Sometimes the Grievers would get trapped by the maze and have to go the long way around to rejoin the action.

Students that get "out" don't have to wait too long to get in, plus the game is almost as much fun to watch as it is to play.

Things I Tried (That didn't really work):

This game took several iterations to get into its current form.  I tried:

• Giving the Runners the "Daytime/Nighttime" schedule and having the Grievers only come out at night.  This resulted in half of the students waiting a lot of time, and only short periods of exciting activity.
• Having both Runners and Grievers on scooters.  We ran out of scooters.
• Dividing the students into 3 groups and having 1 group move the maze.  Students don't know how to fairly move the maze.
• Having the Runners work cooperatively to get all of the target balls.  Most of them wouldn't leave safety.

Things I Will Try Next:

I would like to try re-introducing the "Day / Night" schedule and have the safe zone close during the Night cycle.  This would more closely mirror the Night from the movie.  Plus, the horror of having the door close as you get near!

Introducing DEN

I recently found out about the Discovery Education Network (DEN), a teaching resource that has been provided to us in the Surrey School District. It is a website that has a ton of useful content and activities to enhance the curriculum and engage students in their learning (as well as online utilities to help teachers manage their classes use of the tools). Plus, it has the BC learning outcomes built in, allowing you to search for content by PLO - an added bonus!

I've been able to find a lot of videos for my science learning outcomes (specifically human body for the grade 5's). Sometimes my problem is that there is too much content to sort through. Usually I try and stick to videos that have lesson plans and worksheets attached to help me with my planning.

Setting up my class was also really easy, as our Surrey Tech Guys have put in all the students in Surrey into their login database.  The students use their Surrey-issued email address as their account, and when I search to add students to my class, my view is already filtered so I can only see students at my school.  I can create separate classes for my 5's and 6's, and assign different content to each of them.

I've recently become a DEN Star, which means that I've shared my DEN experiences with staff and now have access to more features.  Expect more updates as I find new things to share!

Freshgrade beta

I would love a grade book app that supports rubrics, and I haven't found one yet.  The new beta from Freshgrade looks like it has potential to change that.

One feature that I've found to be interesting is the ability to tag multiple learning outcomes for each assessment.  I like the idea of assessing assignments with a cross-curricular focus.

They also have multiple assessment scales, including the 1-4 scale that is the basis of report cards in Surrey.  If they can expand this into into rubrics, they will have something that I will definitely use.

Another feature I like is the iPhone app for anecdotal text and picture assessment.  It doesn't currently have any tagging for learning outcomes, so any notes you make go into the student's assessment stream.  Not too useful for assessing yet, but there is still time for that to change.

The support for split classes is also appreciated - activities and learning outcomes can be assigned to subgroups of students, with the default choices being by grade.  Very thoughtful!

This website is currently 70% of the way to the system that I would have created.  I'm looking forward to participating in the beta and hopefully they continue improving what is a promising product.

Hunger Games Dodgeball

The best games are those where you take a theme that the kids enjoy, and combine it with a game that they already like.  Exactly like peanut butter and chocolate.  Our class collaborated and came up with rules for a (safer) version of the Hunger Games.

Before
1. Create districts.  I divided the students up into districts of 2 people each.  The gym we have is just too small to all play at the same time, so we used the districts to take turns - one person from each district got to play at a time.  With bigger areas, this might not be necessary.

The Setup:
1. Create a circle of cones - one cone for each person playing.  These are the starting positions for the players.  They need to stand with both feet on the cones, and must stay on the cones until the countdown has finished.  Some players will "jump the gun" - these players are out (much like leaving the starting spots early in the hunger games - but again - safer).

2. Create a pile of soft projectiles in the centre - these are whatever you use for dodgeball.  Placing them in the centre creates a dilemma for the students: go for the "weapons" and risk getting out quickly, or leave and risk being defenceless.

3. Scatter larger objects around the edges - I use giant rubber balls.  These are not allowed to be thrown, but can be used to block without getting out.  I also might put some strange objects, like foam frisbies, at various places.

4. Setup obstacles - stand up crash mats, if you have them, in various places to create places to hide.

The Rules:
1. If you are hit, you are out.  Go to the side and become a "sponsor".

2. If you tip over a cone, when starting or later on when running, you are out.  You may move a cone as long as you don't let the sides touch the ground.

3. People that are waiting on the edges are sponsors.  If any useful objects roll near them, they may grab them and attempt to pass them to a person of their choosing (sponsor them).

4. If the game slows down (eg. people hiding in corners), the "Game Master" can announce events to keep the game moving.  For example, "A firestorm has started in this half of the gym!  You have 5 seconds to evacuate or you are out!"

The Results:
Students had to keep moving at all times.  The most successful ones were those that stayed moving.

Being successful in one round makes you a target in future rounds, which spreads around the success.  I had 8 different winners in 10 rounds.

Students who are "out" still have a chance to stay engaged, plus they are usually only a couple minutes away from being back in the game.

Everybody has a chance to get someone out, as it is not possible to keep track of all players at once.  I joined in the later rounds, and was usually blind-sided by someone I didn't see coming.

Extensions:
Our class thought it might be fun to have a "training" session where people got to try different events (dodgeball targets, agility ladders, climbing, etc.) to try and earn sponsors.  This could be a gym period where people have stations and keep track of their scores.  This would be a fun way to get ready for the "Hunger Games".

Technology and the Human Body

I wanted to have a project that my students could work on as we learned about the different systems that make up the human body.  A traditional approach (and commonly used one) is using a life-sized cutout that is created by tracing a student who is lying on a piece of paper.  Then organs are printed or drawn and glued into place.

So I gave the cutout a try.  It was a disaster. The projects are huge and difficult to store.  Students were always losing pieces and one group never finished their skeleton. So I needed to make a change. How could I accomplish the same goal with less mess, wasted paper, and wasted time?

Enter technology.  I realized what I was really after was for the students to recognize the size and location relationships between themselves and their organs. So I used Comic Life and iPads.  I had the students take pictures of themselves and then gave them images of the various organs, so they could place the images above their torso. They can stretch, rotate and resize the organs to fit their own body size.  In the end, they end up with a picture that can become part of a "my body" ebook or portfolio.

Compared to the paper endeavour, I found that my students were overall more engaged in the process.  It was much easier, and took way less time, for a greater degree of learning!

iPads and Buddies

My buddy teacher and I have an understanding.  She does the “floofy” projects (art and crafts) and I do the PE and tech projects.  I thought a good place to start would be to use Book Creator to create simple books with our buddies.

Using Book Creator, the students took pictures of their little buddies in various activities (running, jumping, phoning, playing soccer) and wrote sentences describing what was happening (for example "Kabir is playing soccer.")  Some of my students wanted to use Comic Life instead, so theirs were formated a little different, but still worked towards the same end goal.

The big buddies were responsible for showing their buddies how to open and turn on the iPads, and then getting the app running and a new document made.  They then showed their buddies how to take pictures and add text.  

The project went great!  Every group was able to create pages with content.  Some groups ended up with longer books than others.  At the end we had a sharing time where students took turns projecting their work on the Apple TV and reading to the class.

The project took 45 minutes, which would be the minimum time you could get away with and still have finished products for each group.  In the end, my buddy teacher learned a new skill, my admin was happy that I was passing around my tech knowledge, and my students had a great time.  

Initial Inspiration

I’ve been told many times that I should blog, but have always felt that I’m not doing enough things the “right way” in my classroom to put myself “out there”.  This time, I’ve taken on a big enough task that I’m going to need support to pull it off.

On Wednesday, I was part of the first Digital Learner event for the year, where we listened to a variety of speakers who left us with a lot to think about.  The keynote speaker,  Will Richardson (@willrich45) said something that I’ve heard before, but hadn't fully processed, which is "if we were teaching the same way that we’ve been taught, how have we progressed in the last 20 years?"  He also brought up the point that we really aren’t needed to teach children specific skills – they can learn about fractions or decimals online very easily.  Our job is to make, shape and develop self-sustaining learners – people that can figure out what they need to know and go out and learn it.

This got me thinking about my math program.  I am excited to teach math, but I fall back on the same model of showing something concretely, pictorially, numerically, and then giving students questions to do until they have achieved some form of mastery.  In the younger grades, it seems to work fine, but I invariably end up giving the quick finishers more difficult concepts to keep them interested (and occupied).  In a grade 5/6 classroom, the range of abilities that I have at my doorstep is just as wide, but my quick finishers are getting even further ahead.

So the idea that sprung into my head is to let everyone in the class work at their own pace.  This doesn't seem like a totally novel concept, but is a great challenge than it sounds.  This led me to create a checklist of the math calculating skills from grades 5 and 6.  I used this as an inventory for the students to assess what math skills they are confident in.

The second thing I did was have them create a small journal entry in their math books, completing the sentence, “Today I am going to learn about…”

I gave them some goals for how they could demonstrate mastery of a concept:

1. Show me an easy question, a medium question, and a difficult question
2. Solve the questions
3. Explain the steps that it takes to solve them
4. Explain how they would use that math “in real life”. 

When we finished our hour and a half of math (which passed by in a flash), I had them write another small journal entry summarizing, “Today I learned / made progress on / got stuck on…”  

During the math class, I saw a level of student engagement that surprised me.  In fact, it surpassed expectation.  Most of the students loved the idea.  My favourite comment was a question from a student who asked, “Mr. Becker, what happens if I make a mistake?”  He was surprised and relieved to find out that mistakes didn’t matter, that they were actually a good thing to make, and it only mattered if you learned what you were working on.

The self-inventory worked quite well!  Of course a couple students still checked things off that they didn’t really know.  In one case it was a complete lack of understanding of the math concepts, and the other was a student who knew that he should know multiplying, but actually didn’t.  The journal entries worked well to focus the students on their tasks, and the debrief of the entries were valuable to me to gauge their progress.

This exercise showed me that there is a lot of potential in this method of teaching.  It also showed me that I have a LOT of work ahead of me.  I need to create “drill sheets” – short timed drill exercises that are designed to take students from the point of understanding towards automation of the skills.  I also need to come up with interesting challenge questions for students to apply their newfound understanding against, in order to gauge if they understand or are mechanically recalling a process they have learned.  I'm looking forward to the journey ahead!