Learning is Fun (especially if you don't know you are learning)

January 3. 2013
The first day back to school after a break can be horrible for students and teachers alike.  My goal today was to make it not horrible for as many kids as I could.  I figured that my students need their brains turned back on before I give them a district Benchmark test next week.  My plan, make them laugh while they are learning.  They might not notice the hard work their brains are doing.  I must preface this with the fact that they didn't love all of the lesson, but they did ask if we could do this everyday.  So I would say it was a success.

Every student needs to know that they still have creativity somewhere inside them.  They also need to be given a chance to use it without feeling like they are weird.  I made everyone be silly.  I told them that the only thing I wanted to do today was laugh.  No grade other than participation, just laughing.

The activity consisted of drawing a location word, an object word, and a character word out of 3 separate cups.  All the words were pretty basic things, but when combined randomly, created some interesting scenarios.

High-rise office

Foot Doctor

Tools

Bank

Police Officer

History book

Mountains

Umbrella

Comedian

Museum

Sculpture

Burger Flipper

Amazon River

Car keys

Scorpion

For each scenario, I gave the kids 3 minutes to write a few sentences linking the 3 pieces together.  I think my favorite was the bank robber who escaped from the police officer by smacking him with the history book.  I also had to chuckle at the raw meat museum featuring a sculpture of SpongeBob as a burger-flipper.  All totally silly, but really good stuff coming from my kids who have reading and writing disabilities.  No one would have known that today.  They had fun and they learned about a skill they have inside of them that they can use to their advantage.  At the end of the class, I had them choose their favorite story and give the characters names and 3 character traits.  This was equally as funny as the stories themselves.  My plan is that they will build on these stories a bit at a time over the next few weeks until they have something they are proud of.

The juices are flowing and we had a good time today.  Mission accomplished.