AISD's character education touchstone for December and January is caring. We will continue on, however, with basic social skills for Burnet. This week we will practice respect and caring by giving compliments.  As always, use the lesson plans in the way that suits you. The expectation remains that students understand the purpose for advisory and that teachers emphasize skills and attributes that create a positive campus climate in a student centered way.
lesson_plan_dec_7-11.doc
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i_like_my__friend_because.doc
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respect_for_others.ppt
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respect_for_others_2_powerpoint_presentation.ppt
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self-respect.ppt
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For the last two weeks you've gotten lesson plans and materials to teach basic character education for Burnet. You and your class should have defined problems and solutions that teachers and students on campus face; you should have generated some basic core values and a result statement, and you should have come up with student roles and responsibilities. Your students should know the purpose of advisory as well.
 
If none of this has happened so far, perhaps you are approaching the problem of character education in your own way. Hopefully you've generated the same basic results. If not, please make it so. Walk-throughs will be happening. Our program will not accomplish very much if we do not follow it, so we will begin collecting the data that shows we are following it.
 
This week we are continuing with our theme of basic remedial character education. We will define respect and we will model respect with a social skills review.
 
This lesson plan, social skills review, and PowerPoint will feel to the students as if you are just lecturing them unless you allow the students themselves to lead the lesson plan. This may be difficult at first: kids will be goofy and it might seem like nothing gets accomplished. But this is a practice and will have good results over time. They need to be responsible for their own learning sometimes. So please facilitate one or two students as leaders who will introduce the lesson and decide how best to teach it. Some suggestions for how to do this are included in the lesson plan.

character_ed_lesson_plan_nov_23-4.doc
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respect_for_others.ppt
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social_skills_2.doc
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What’s My Role?

Objective: 
SWBAT develop or identify the purpose for advisory. SWBAT develop a result statement. SWBAT identify a minimum of two student roles and responsibilities at Burnet. SWBAT define the reason for this activity: to take responsibility for their actions at school.

Materials
:
Copy of Burnet Middle School Advisory Roles and Responsibilities

Length of time:  Four advisory periods

Sequence
: Monday: Briefly review the list of problems and solutions you defined last week.  Discuss the concept of empowerment: we are taking back our school to have the kind of school we want. Display the BMS Advisory Student Roles and Responsibilities and focus on the “purpose for advisory” box. The core values on the completed form are “personal, academic, and civic empowerment” As a class, develop your own core values using the blank form. Develop a  result statement as well.

Tuesday
. Review your results statement and your core values from Monday. Discuss the “Roles and Responsibilities” box. Students develop two roles and responsibilities  for what they would need to do to build a good school community.

Wednesday
: Review the two roles and responsibilities  from Tuesday. Develop two more.

Thursday
: Role play the roles and responsibilities you have developed. For instance, if “respectful communication” was a one responsibility the teacher would play the role of student, and would role play a disruptive, disrespectful, abusive student. The student would play the role of the teacher, and would model respectful communication. Repeat this for as many roles and responsibilities as you have time for.

Friday: Appreciation: single out students and publicly appreciate something about them. Model this by appreciating the whole class for the work they did on their roles and responsibilities statement. Model it for the individual student by singling one student out (maybe someone who doesn’t get noticed or one with whom you’ve so far failed to develop a strong relationship). Students can choose to appreciate one another in turn.


Work product: 

Burnet Middle School Advisory Roles and Responsibilities statement. Try to go paper free: use overhead transparencies, a projection screen, the Smartboard, or a document camera for display rather than giving a paper copy to each student.

Notes:
Our objective is two-fold: use advisory to educate about shared values in a student-centered way. Modify this lesson in any way that works for you but let’s reinforce a consistent message across the entire campus.

blank_student_roles_and_responsibilities.docx
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bms_student_roles_and_responsibilities.docx
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This week’s lesson plan is devoted to holding the same type of brainstorming discussion about problems at Burnet that we teachers had on Monday. Teachers spent the day defining problems at coming up with solutions as a campus-wide staff development. Please do the same kind of activity in your advisory classroom: the 90 percent of students who want to succeed need a chance to express their views and have input about solutions. 
   
Beginning next week we will devote Advisory to Character Ed lesson plans that specifically address problems here at Burnet. Once they have been finalized we will cover the expectations that we developed during Monday's training. I will provide hard copy and electronic lesson plans. EVERY ADVISORY TEACHER WILL BE EXPECTED TO ADDRESS CHARACTER EDUCATION ISSUES THAT WE FACE AT BURNET at least until we feel some changes have begun.

The lesson plans we use every day will be in the share drive Advisory folder in a folder titled "Burnet Character Education" as well as attached to your campus emails OR as hard copy in your box if you prefer (but you need to make the preference clear to me!)
 
If there's just one thing in this entire post you have time to pay attention to, let it be this:  visit The League   and find out about service learning projects, specifically The Drive to collect canned foods throughout November

Monday:Student-centered issues: Obesity: CATCH curriculum activity breaks

Tuesday and Wednesday: Character Education: check out the Learning to Give service project toolkit. On our campus network share drive and on The League (AISD's partner in service learning website) is a canned food drive toolkit

Thursday: Academics: play "password" (attached) using science vocabulary

Friday: free choice: show pictures from Halloween. Everyone always has Halloween pictures!! 

Please take a moment to post your favorite lesson plans, activities resources, videos, websites, podcasts, how-to's, experience, and total freakouts on the forum page of this site. We have found some pages won't load from desktops so it's better to use your laptops. 

Website for the week: The League: dozens of service learning projects 

Interesting video for the week: a Discovery Streaming video called  “Rant” which follows two live ants on a series of misadventures; one ant is a Mexican immigrant and the other is a native Anglo. The video is an intersting take on tolerance and stereotypes. See your campus email for the username and password. URLs, Usernames, and Passwords are also available through the BMS Library on Ms Shelby’s helpful takehome card.

Tip of the week: if you need tech help please email me or Sally Lesley and we will come to your room and help you do stuff you're not sure about. For Real.
 
 Mondays: Teen issues. GREAT VIDEOS and resources   If you haven't created an iTunes account on your laptop and you need help, let me know. If you already have an iTunes account, make sure you check out the George Lucas Educational Foundation videos. They are FREE, there are tons, and they are high quality. They directly address issues related to character education. And speaking of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, pease see their website. It's FANTASTIC because it has tons of interesting, helpful, useful videos, lesson plans, and articles. http://www.edutopia.org/ 

Tuesday and Wednesday: character education: Schoolwide Expectations Posters   If you have not yet begun or completed the schoolwide expectations posters that Ms Ross has requested, please complete those in Advisory this week.

More character education: Canned food drive Thanksgiving will be upon us right away. Advisory is THE place to address a can food drive as part of a service learning project. Ideas: make decorated collection boxes to place throughout the school; make posters to inform and motivate the students; check out a video from the library and have the students write the script and act in and direct a short movie about poverty, hunger, need, or homelessness or just about Thanksgiving!  More to come, as I do not yet know who normally runs the canned food drive, and need to coordinate with them.

Character ed in content classes: See  "Using Character Ed in the classroom" to combine content with character .

Thursdays: Academics Use one of the games in your binder (sparkle, chain reaction) to have fun with science vocabulary; allow students to catch up with homework they may have missed (progress reports are going out and I know my kids missed a few assignments they need to make up)  

Fridays: free choice introduce the possibilities of the computer lab as options!! See your binder for some ideas. If you need help with any of the computer issues let me know!!!!!
 
Materials you may need beforehand: butcher paper, markers, and things  to make posters.

For Brainpop episode on graphic design: the username is burnetms, password is 8401

Tuesday: Discussion topic: why do we have advisory? Ask if students can articulate the purpose of advisory. Talk about shared values, common culture, and a positive campus. Talk about what prevents those things. Introduce the PBS advisory assignment Ms Ross already forwarded to the campus. Inspire them with a Brainpop episode about art and culture such as "Graphic Design, a Language of Visual Communication."   

Wednesday and Thursday
: work on posters. The topic for October is courage. Discuss ways that it takes courage to go against peer pressure  and how it takes courage to be a leader and to  refuse to be pressured into doing things you know are wrong, such as tagging, skipping.    

Friday:
trusted students can go put up posters in small groups; those that need supervsion could be led around campus to pick up trash.
 
In case you misplaced Jane's email about PBS posters:

Dear Burnet Sailors, The PBS team met this morning, and one of the topics that we discussed was signage for common areas. (We will email minutes of the meeting to everyone.) Last year, departments created and posted signs. This year, the team decided that advisories will create and post signs. The expectations for you to use when creating and posting signs is: S:\shared\staff\2008-2009 folders\Sailor Manual -  Behavior Management Plan     Cut and paste this link on the address line of your browser. Signs are most effective when students create them. :)

Which Advisories are responsible for creating/posting which signs? Arrival = 6.1 Dismissal = 6.2 Cafeteria = 7.1 Hallways = 8.1 Restrooms = ESL Assemblies = 7.2 SAIL = 8.2
Please create and post the signs by October 31st.

We thank you very much for being such a terrific group of teachers!
With good thoughts, Jane
 
This blog is the heart of our advisory website. This is where we'll be posting weekly lesson ideas and asking you to comment on them. Stay tuned for our first post.