Our class is learning about cooperation and teamwork as part of our IB unit:
People share responsibility in order to achieve a common purpose. We tried
to play a game called the Human Knot. In this game, children stand in a close
circle and take the hands of somebody opposite them until everyone’s hands
are joined. The goal is then to untangle the circle without letting go of
your partner’s hands. Strategies for doing this included taking our arms
over the heads of other students, stepping under or over other children”s
arms and trying to invert the circle.
It was a very difficult activity for the students with 14 children and we
were unable to untangle the knot. But then we tried the game with only 7 students
and it worked! The IB attitude we were trying to use were cooperation and
the IB learner profile was “communicator”.
This week we introduced a new spelling strategy from Australia called Have a
go. Here are some pictures of children having 3 attempts to spell a word
correctly and then deciding which word looks the best. Children need to
learn to try and spell words by themselves instead of always asking the
teacher to help them spell. It will help them to develop phonemic awareness
and words they see in their readers.
