After everyone was gathered in the gym, I greeted them with their instructions for the day.They were told they had been captured by a crew of swashbuckling pirates that wanted to take their treasures hostage. and that they had 6 hours to escape. They would be solving clues all day and they would hopefully be finding lots of treasures. They were dismissed to their classrooms, but the usual walk down the hallways was anything but usual. The kindergarten kids were in an ocean of blue. The hall was decorated from ceiling to floor with blue paper. Fish, waves and treasure chests were what they kids walked past. The first and second grade hall was full of seaweed, a blow up pirate ship and treasure maps. The third and fourth graders were greeted with sea turtles on the ceiling, and if anyone needed to go into the FEMA shelter, they would first have to be "plank certified" by walking over a plank into their wing. Genius fourth grade.
It was a memorable 8 hours for everyone. Throughout the day, every single student searched for clues to find treasures such as skull rings, eyepatches, gold coin necklaces and pirate tattoos. The final clue lead the entire student body into the gym where they were given their HOUSE shirts after shouting, "Bring us our Treasure" to the teachers. It was priceless. The teachers had been given their shirts a couple weeks ago and several students had commented that they wished they had them as well. It was their lucky day. One of the best parts, though, was when we "slide certified" 43 kids right before school was out. We have been doing this for weeks, but the kids on this particular day slid down the slide, which was in the middle of our ship, as smoke swirled around them from a fog machine and a "pirate" watched from inside the ship. I'm thinking that will be an experience they will never forget.
If you're thinking it was all fun and games, though, you can think again. Here are just a few highlights of what went on in our classrooms that day. First grade teachers incorporated an app called Flipgrid with Chatterpix (app smashing) where Mr. Phillps and I recorded ourselves giving them clues to math problems that they had to solve throughout the day. Mrs. Smith conducted BreakOut EDU with her students. They had to solve clues and work together in groups, using higher order thinking skills to find the answers which opened the locks. I can confirm that they did indeed Break Out. The -ar sound was taught in phonics as students worked on identifying words that should be spelled with -ar. Mrs. Baldwin taught estimation by completing a STEM project with boats. Miss Gilion used Plickers to assess comprehension of an article about making maps. Pirate stories were written by many. In fact here is one of the success stories from the day. We have a third grader who came to us last year who had a lot of anger issues. He had to be restrained several times and he didn't like writing, so he spent a lot of time in Mr. Phillips' office. This year, with third grade being writing intensive, he has struggled with the writing assignments he has been given. He couldn't write about vacations, because he hadn't ever been on one. But after our Pirates of the CARRverbbean Day, he was able to write a personal narrative about the experienceas he had that day. So much learning, yet so much fun.
I share the same philosophy Wade King, curriculum director and teacher for the Ron Clark Academy, has. He believes it's our job as educators to provide kids with positive experiences that they can connect content to. We know kids will retain more information when they have experiences instead of just being given information. That's exactly what our Carver crew did at Pirates of the CARRverbbean. Hadley Williams told her mom, our middle school principal, that we just had fun that day. So when her teacher asked her about it, she had a strange look on her face. Her teacher said, "Hadley, did we write a story. She said, 'Yes. " Mrs. Barratt said, "Do you remember the math problems we worked on that day." She said, "Yes." Her teacher then said, "Then why did you tell your mom all we did was fun stuff?" Hadley said, "It didn't seem like work." Mrs. Barratt and I looked at each other and smiled, happy smiles. I said, "That's exactly what we wanted." Mission accomplished.
Classroom tranformations are beginning to happen in our building, and this one was our first building transformation. The kids were still talking about it at the end of the week. Many of them wore their rings and necklaces past Monday. I can't believe I've been doing this education gig for 25 years and haven't been doing transformations before now. If you aren't doing them, ask yourself why not. If you think it's costly, you are wrong. Cardboard, paint, table cloths, and butcher paper were what most of our props were made with. Ask yourself if you are finding yourself doing the same activities and worksheets year after year? Why? We all can do better. Are you stepping out of your comfort zone and trying new strategies with kids? Just try it. You'll see how fun it is. We've done a lot of new ideas at Carver this year and we have plans for many, many more. We are still meeting the standards, it's just a lot more fun this year. As we plan what we will do next, I know without a doubt, I will happily continue to hear statements such as, "Well, this is a morning I'll ALWAYS remember."
