Weekly Update

January 24, 2020

Hello Roadrunners!

Although this week was a short one, we learned and accomplished many things!

As I mentioned in my last update, we began the topic of “communication” this week. To kick this unit off, we started with doing a couple of hands on activities and then had whole-class follow up discussions on how those activities related back to communication.

One of my favorite discussions came after we played the popular game of “Telephone”. We played three rounds, but each round had a different number of words in its message. For example, our first message was an entire sentence, our next was only three words, and our last message was only one word. After the game, we discussed why it was so difficult to get the full sentence and three worded messages around the circle accurately, but the one word message we were able to get correct.

I then led their conversation into how that relates to gossip and rumors and how stories can be miscommunicated or exaggerated. We discussed whether gossip and rumors are the same or different and if one leads to the other (i.e. rumors lead to gossip or vice versa).

Towards the end of class, I took an anonymous poll of the class to see how many of them had either spread gossip/rumors or had been victims of gossip or a rumor. This was important for me to do because I wanted them to see just how many people are affected by gossip and rumors, which was more than half the class!

Yesterday and today, we talked about miscommunication as a whole and about some strategies to hopefully help overcome or minimize it. Along these same lines, we also talked about disagreements and how it’s okay to disagree/have different opinions, but it’s not okay to be mean about them. To kick these discussions off, we watched two videos: Kid President (disagreements) and a Ted Talk (miscommunication). Both of these videos offered tips on how we can better communicate and share opinions with one another, which everyone seemed to reflect on.

On Monday, we will finish up our last communication activity, which will be focused on verbal and non-verbal communication. We touched on it briefly today, but ran out of time. The rest of next week we will be discussing the topic of “assertiveness”, more so on how we can stand our ground when in tough decision making situations.

As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns: btaylor@santancs.com.

-Mrs. Taylor