Morning Mashup

While thinking about ways to connect with the students in my class I came up with the idea of having a morning mash up. A 5 minute brainstorm session on things that are of interest to the students and to me. It could be something we heard on the news or radio, a question, a concern, a high five moment. Anything that we would like to share that would be of interest to the rest of the class.

I started to do this in the week during my practicum when I only had the Year 5 students (Year 6 were on camp). They loved it! We had all sorts of items mentioned.  One item that led to a further discussion was the news of a 100 car pile up in the UK.  The questions the children had about this one ranged from which car in the 100 would be most damaged to how could that many cars not see what was happening in front of them?  We then spent a few minutes trying to figure out the answers.

I guess that it may not always be practical to do this each day. However, these sessions told me a lot about my students.  It taught me that one boy was obsessed with cricket as he wanted to relay the Australian team's current standing, and that an Australian cricketer had broken the record of the highest score in a Twenty20 match.  It taught me that one of the girls in the class was interested in sharing her own achievements, did this mean recognition was one of her love languages and/or that she was not getting that recognition elsewhere?

Once the Year 6 students returned from camp they enjoyed this time as well. It actually took away some of the time spent each day with disruptive questions to the class as they had already had some voice time. One morning I shared a video I had found with them, called Little Video, Big Messages, I think, I hope it had some impact on them.

I will definitely be using this with my class the next time I am teaching. Why not give it a try?