Beautiful Day

It was a beautiful day today. I had a great moment with my 4th graders today. During our planned science class I decided to do a contest. I had two large paper bags and told the class I had a contest and needed two teams. I said the boys would be one team and the girls would be the other. Since I only have 9 girls and 11 boys I said I would be on the girls team. Well, the contest was to collect the most garbage from around our school (today is Earth Day, after all). Well, all of the kids were so excited - especially about competing with each other. So after 15 minutes we were about 1/2 way done walking around the school grounds. Lunch recess was going on, so we couldn't even go near that area. I asked them if they wanted to be done and go back to our air conditioned classroom (it was about 77 degrees today)....or did they want to continue. They all wanted to keep picking up garbage. They were delighted with all of the weird items they picked up - some money, pokemon cards, misc junk. So we finished up with in 10 minutes and walked back to our room.

I asked the principal to come and see all of the JUNK we picked up and he stopped by and complemented my class on their great work.

So, who was the winner????? Our school was. It lucked out to get all of the junk picked up. So, to reward my class for their 20 minutes of garbage duty I allowed them 20 minutes of an extra recess.

It was a great learning moment. They felt good about what they did - helped their school - worked as a team - and enjoyed a fun recess. The interesting thing was that when we were coming back in from recess (on the playground that we missed cleaning) - that the kids had a few pieces of trash they picked up to throw away!

It really was a beautiful day!