The beginning of a new school year is a thrilling time to be a kid and to be a teacher. So many new faces and friends and ways to play! A new group, a new classroom, new materials and routines! So much newness begs the question: Who will we become together?!
Coming up with a classroom name is a beloved Barrow tradition and The Blue Room process adds its own special twist to the ritual.
It all starts with…
Stuffies!
Each day, for the first six days, the Blue Room kiddos were introduced to some special classroom friends. We warmly greeted each stuffy with our names in the circle – a fun and low-risk way to introduce ourselves and learn each other’s names!
Then at the end of the day, it’s time to give the new stuffy a name! Two kids are randomly selected to share an idea for a name, then the whole class votes. This has been an excellent opportunity to practice counting and number recognition and comparing quantities. Not to mention, being flexible if your favorite name is not the one chosen!
Unicorn and Leely
Luly Blue and Dah Dah
Giraffie and Louie
Now that we met all our stuffies and gave them names, it was about time for us to begin thinking about our own Blue Room class name! We had plenty of practice voting under our belts, but this time the stakes were a little higher and it was going to look a little different:
That is when The Voting Booth was introduced. There were three head to head matchups each afternoon and every child got a ballot and submitted their votes. This was the subject of much conversation among friends. We talked about how voting is a time to make your own voice heard and so it was very important to use your own brain – not your friend’s! – when making these choices.
As you can see, the Blue Room friends took this job seriously.
At Closing Meeting each day, we counted up the results of each election LIVE. There was a whole lot of suspense, excitement, and math involved. Including an unexpected, very silly moment…in which a surprise nose covering (thank you, Perry) sparked uproarious laughter from ALL of us in the Blue Room. What fun it is to be together!
After four rounds of elections (including a surprise tie!) we finally have chosen our class mascot!!
The final vote was ELECTRIC and the results are in:
With our Giraffe as our mascot, teachers knew that this group couldn’t just be the Giraffes…
In our 11 days of school together, we have seen all of the Blue Room kids display many wonderful acts of generosity with each other and their teachers.
When we asked the group if they had heard of the word generous before, here is what they said:
“you share things with everybody”
“it’s letting everybody into your game”
“when you are being kind”
“let people run with you”
We repeated and listened to the words “generous” and “giraffes” and we could hear that they both started with the same sound. Generous Giraffes sounds like a pretty good class name to us!!
What does generous mean to your family?
