Ranum Week 17

Hello and welcome to the final post of 2016!

I can't believe it's already Winter Break. It was a great first semester filled with lots of laughs and learning. I think students and teachers are both excited for the very much deserved break.

This final week we focused on a big project called Emotion Sculptures. The idea of the project was for mentors and mentees to choose any emotion they have felt recently and try to create an abstract sculpture of that emotion. Pretty simple directions, they could be as creative as they wanted to be as long as they could explain the emotion and why they chose shape it in the way they did. Here are a few examples:

I was very impressed by what some of the students created (they are way more creative than me). They really took the project head on and ran with it.

I wish everyone a happy and safe holiday and looking forward to 2017!

Ranum Week 16

Welcome back for Week 16 at Ranum Middle School.

This past week we discussed anger, and peaceful conflict resolution. It was perfect because we talked about different things that made us frustrated which led to a lot of our anger. We also found out that most of us do not take the time to go back, think about the cause and how we could've handled the situation better or even to go back to the person we had fought with and figure out what happened. There were a lot of great discussions and it's obviously a big topic that everyone can relate to.

After anger, we talked about conflict resolution, so basically how we solve some of those anger outbursts. Again, this was very helpful because it broke down whatever conflict happened to you into very simple steps that allow you to try to avoid the same thing from happening again in the future. Here is an example from one of the students:

Another great week in the books and just one more week until Winter Break!

Ranum Week 15

Hello and welcome back!

After a nice week long Thanksgiving Break we dove right back into where we left off, emotions.

Before we continued with emotions, we had Mentor Monday. We discussed leadership and started learning about a current leader in our world, Malala Yousafzai. Students learned her backstory and how she came back after being targeted by the Taliban. She is a huge supporter of education, specifically a woman's right to education. The mentors loved learning about her and her inspirational story.

Tutoring Tuesday went well with students being asked to check in with all of their teachers to find out where they are behind. Mentors are also required to check in with their mentees teachers to insure they are on the same page.

Wednesday through Friday was all about the Emo Trolls. We talked about what they are, where they come from and how to handle them. The kids loved the analogy and the variety of Emo Trolls out there. We discussed how sometimes we act as Trolls for a variety of reasons and we related it back to how our Hot Buttons can sometimes trigger these Trolls to come out. After discussion, they were required to draw each Emo Troll and give a personal definition and example. Here is one of the students posters:

Overall, it was a great and fun week. Looking forward to continue with emotions this week!