I have a third grade reading group that has been studying 'Mr. Popper's Penguins' and early on the the book, I made a paper penguin, laminated it, and stuck it on my door. I found the penguin character entertaining, truth be told, but also because children still couldn't find our room, so it was a land mark sort of thing [look for the penguin!] but also because I was trying to come up with something to engage students.
This was semi successful/semi failure; I started writing questions on the penguin meant for student engagement, but there was no method for students to respond. I had no sheets of paper or an envelope or pencils or a reward of any kind. Maybe I should have grabbed one of the magnetic locker pencil holders off our fridge and brought it in [I think of this now, as I'm looking at the picture along with all of you].
I have rewards, let me tell you, you should see my pencil drawer.
Every day, here is the happy little penguin, doing a happy dance on the door. What to do... What to do...
Time passes. On what is a seemingly unrelated note, my new cohort, Jarrod and and I, are also sort of in charge of the Litter Free School zone program, and initially I thought I would end up doing a random clean up day with the fifth graders. Fifth grade, more responsible, better listening skills, et cetera. ... Or so I thought. Here I am, the one supposed to be doing the teaching.
Third grade and I are still reading MPP, as I only see them once or twice a week, and it occurs to me after we read a whole chapter devoted to the penguin puttering around the house building a nest from house flotsam[read:litter] - Lightbulb - there just might be a cross-curricular learning/small service opportunity in there.
I think we managed to get out on the last nice day of November [70 degrees and sunny - how did this happen?!]. The students had an absolute blast. And to top it all off, they love this book so much, they were bouncing around the playground, looking for litter, pretending to be penguins, picking up trash with their 'flippers'. The school grounds are pretty clean though, so we didn't find much. Go team keeping the place clean!
I wouldn't want to use trash for my project idea from outside anyway, because that isn't 'safe' trash. Before we went outside, the students and I talked about what I had in mind - building a penguin nest for the door out of bits of debris we'd find around school, like the penguin did in the book. Oh, the excitement! But what could that look like? What was 'safe' trash to use for this project and what wasn't 'safe'. I made it clear ahead of time that we weren't going to use anything from outside.
I didn't expect to encounter any rusted metal, exposed needles or broken glass, but one never knows what they're going to encounter. Thankfully, we didn't see any of those things outside the school. We did find a lot of plastic wrappers, plastic 'stuff' and bits of paper. We threw all that out.
Glad the riding mower didn't hit
that. That day, I learned third grade can completely surprise you. Make no assumptions about anyone.
When we came back in, we talked more about what a collage is and what we could put on it for our project - paper clips, too short pencils, the wrapper off the top of their breakfast cereal from breakfast, the plastic spoon they used at lunch [as long as we washed it off]. This was waste that we knew where it came from and was
safe to use, it wasn't going to hurt us. Should we use a Unifix cube from math class that was laying on the floor? No, give it back to the teacher. What about an extra cotton ball from a class project? The kids agreed 'as long as there was no spit, snot or blood involved, it's cool', they could use it. Their words, not mine. They saved up some things and on Friday, we began putting a penguin rookery together.
What they don't know yet is that they have to collaboratively write a short piece about
a. what a rookery is and what it's really made out of
b. which penguins make them [because not all do]
c. why we made ours [citing where they found it in the book]
d. what keep PA beautiful is
and we'll put it on the door with Capt. Cook. Gork.
Time passes. On what is a seemingly unrelated note, my new cohort, Jarrod and and I, are also sort of in charge of the Litter Free School zone program, and initially I thought I would end up doing a random clean up day with the fifth graders. Fifth grade, more responsible, better listening skills, et cetera. ... Or so I thought. Here I am, the one supposed to be doing the teaching. 
I wouldn't want to use trash for my project idea from outside anyway, because that isn't 'safe' trash. Before we went outside, the students and I talked about what I had in mind - building a penguin nest for the door out of bits of debris we'd find around school, like the penguin did in the book. Oh, the excitement! But what could that look like? What was 'safe' trash to use for this project and what wasn't 'safe'. I made it clear ahead of time that we weren't going to use anything from outside. 
When we came back in, we talked more about what a collage is and what we could put on it for our project - paper clips, too short pencils, the wrapper off the top of their breakfast cereal from breakfast, the plastic spoon they used at lunch [as long as we washed it off]. This was waste that we knew where it came from and was safe to use, it wasn't going to hurt us. Should we use a Unifix cube from math class that was laying on the floor? No, give it back to the teacher. What about an extra cotton ball from a class project? The kids agreed 'as long as there was no spit, snot or blood involved, it's cool', they could use it. Their words, not mine. They saved up some things and on Friday, we began putting a penguin rookery together.