This week's cross curricular integration was mental health and character education with drama.
The theory that this week related to was Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which essentially states that students need to have their basic needs met before learning can take place. This is especially important in drama, as a lot of students may have self-esteem or self-confidence issues. Drama can be a very anxiety and stress filled subject area for many students, especially for students who are not having their basic needs (like food, clothing, experiencing bullying) met at school or at home. Therefore, it is important as educators to be aware of this, what happens outside the classroom affects students in their academic journey. And this, in turn, will affect students' learning skills and work habits. For example, students who do not feel physically safe due to bullying, this will affect their ability to collaborate with their peers. Similarly, students who have self-esteem or self-confidence issues, they may require more prompting and therefore this will limit their ability to take on more responsibility and initiative. Therefore, the Learning Skills and Work Habits are affected by the students overall mental health and self-confidence.
This week, we made a lot of great connections to activities that we can play in the classroom to form connections and get students to talk about emotions and bullying. The first activity that stood out to me was the Connection Web. First, a student starts the web by making a comment like "I got bullied in school because I wore pink". Then, another student will join their foot to the original person and make a web. The person who joined must then add a statement that relates to the first person. So, the second person could say "I got bullied because my style was different from the norm." And it continues until the entire class has created a connection. This is a great way to get students thinking about bulling in the class, and to connect with someone that they may not normally.
From this, another activity that would be great to integrate in the classroom would be Sculpture Garden where one person is the sculptor and the other person is the clay. We were asked to sculpt what it would look what bullying could look like and then we did a gallery walk of the sculptures. Then we would switch partners we would sculpt what a happy community would look like. I think that this is a very versatile activity activity that we can use to show cause and effect or before and after of a situation!
From this week's presentation, two of the strategies that really appealed to me were:
1. Caption Making: where students do a tableaux and then write a caption of what the characters are thinking. We demonstrated this through Horton Hear's A Who by Dr. Seuss. The students had to react to a specific scene in the novel. I think that this is a great way to integrate language into the classroom as students are reflecting on a novel or subject area and then doing a tableaux. On the right is an example of some of the captions that students made in our class!
2. The second strategy that I think would be a great community building activity and integrating language arts is Role On The Wall where students describe the character, an event or situation in the story. How I would use this in my classroom would be as a diagnostic or consolidation activity. Essentially, as an Assessment FOR or AS learning activity. Therefore, students are able to anonymously post a reflection or response to what we are learning in class. I think that this activity is versatile and can be used in any subject area!
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