First Grade AIM
Know & Go
Reflecting on our mistakes, retelling geography and hand dancing through farming!
We started our AIM time together reflecting/writing about what we can tell our brain when we make a mistake (I can do better next time, I can learn from this etc.,), then we wrote about what we could tell our brain when someone else points out our mistake (thank you for helping me learn, sorry - I will learn from this mistake etc.,) Learning to embrace and not be afraid of mistakes is such an important life lesson and I get every excited when they mention that they have either shared this lesson at home or if their parents have asked them about it!
I explained to them that today was not a building day but a day to gather knowledge to help us with our next big building project (next week). We started by working in groups to retell and build in our journal a mini version of how the Egyptians came to live and depend on the Nile River for life.
Then I tried something totally new for me as a teacher! I have previous found that teaching about the 3 farming seasons in Egypt is a little dry (no pun intended) so this time I tried "hand dancing". Each group was given a season to read about and then they had to teach the rest of the class about that season by coordinating a dance or series of hand gestures while I read the information aloud. It was awesome! The audience could easily summarize what they had learned in their journals and next week they will include the photos that I took. The information I provided below is just a quick summary of each season to match a few of the photos.
Finally we started to discuss the system of irrigation that the Egyptians had developed. Next week they will be challenged to design their own irrigation system to move water from one area to another...