I just finished my first summer camp as an English Language
Learner (ELL) teacher and mentor teacher: three weeks in second grade. It was
amazing! The theme this summer was “how things grow.” There were so many
directions and so many ways we could take this theme. Ultimately, two other
elementary teachers and I decided to teach “how students grow,” or “how
students learn.” The decided theme was a perfect fit for our primary learners
as they approached another school year. If we can be mindful of what we need to
learn and how we learn, we can become better learners. This was also a perfect
theme that matched my desire to teach social and emotional intelligence and
mindfulness to help cultivate well-rounded students.
} as a basis for our lessons;
this was my first experience with the Hawn Foundation, and it was a positive
experience to say the least. Each of my lessons was adapted to meet the needs
of English Language Learners. We taught about the different parts of the brain,
their function and how they influenced their learning. We also talked about
calming techniques. Yes, I had second graders, ELL students who had limited
English language, saying words like “hippocampus,” “amygdala,” and “prefrontal
cortex!”
On the first day, we took the brain play dough and labeled the different parts of the brain and talked about their functions with partners. To purchase the MindUp curriculum, please click the image below. I will also be creating a lesson pack to accompany the MindUp curriculum, which I will teach in my first 6 weeks of kindergarten this fall! To keep an eye out for a sneak peak and when it comes available, FOLLOW ME on my blog, check me out at mandyfyhrie.com and at TPT!
Below is the recipe I accidentally created while attempting
to replace flour with cornstarch. For those of you chemists, you can probably
tell me why, but it sounded logical enough to me. The disaster worked out in my
favor. It formed into a perfect brain! My students all knew immediately what it
looked like and I didn’t have to mold it much to look like one, either!
Ingredients:
4 cups cornstarch
1 ½ cups salt
¾ cup oil
Red food coloring
This yields enough dough for small 1 ½ inch balls of play
dough for twenty students. It’s the size of a child-sized basketball and much
heavier!
Add the dry ingredients to large mixing bowl and stir. Form a well in the middle of the dry
ingredients. Add 15 to 20 drops of red food coloring to one cup of cold water
in a separate container. Add the oil to the water and food color. Pour the
liquid mixture into the well of the dry ingredients. It will be extremely
chunky and very thick, which is what you want. Once you have all the
ingredients incorporated, add the mixture to a nonstick pot on the stove. Stir
on medium to medium-high heat for 10-15 minutes. Continue to stir with a wooden
spoon. It should be chunky, and will turn into a fat-colored solid and
semi-transparent. Smoosh it down with your spoon, and stir it back on top. You
shouldn’t be able to stir the mixture like a liquid. It will look like kneading
hot, lumpy, bread with a spoon.
When you are finished cooking for 10-15 minutes, place the
mixture on a cutting board to cool. Once it is mostly cool, put the mixture in
a plastic bag, squeezing out all excess air and store in the refrigerator.
Before use, let it store at room temperature inside the plastic
bag. Mine lasted the full three weeks of language camp, and I’m sure it would
last much longer as long as it is stored appropriately inside a plastic
container between uses.