Kick start September with the New (Six Cs) Learning Skills to Students

We just posted our overview lesson for our Six Cs Learning Skills unit, and some fun activities / ice breakers introducing the Six Cs. TL;DR 🙂

Somehow, we slipped into August. For teachers, it’s like the Sunday morning of a really, really long weekend. I’m not ready for school to start yet!

(And, I really need all of those big box stores to stop shoving their “Back to School” sales down my throat! Let me be!)

As surprising as it sounds, I actually like lesson planning. I’ve spent the last few weeks staying up way past my bedtime, polishing up some lessons to kick off September with a bang!

We know that in September, the learning skills for the Ontario report card are changing to these Six Cs.

With that in mind, a few of us have gotten together to figure out how to introduce these new learning skills to our students.

Since we’re going to be doing ice-breakers and getting to know you stuff anyway, we thought we’d tie in these September activities into the Six Cs of Education: Character, Citizenship, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Critical Thinking.

(Actually, the new Learning Skills on the Ontario Report Card doesn’t call it “Character” – they call it self-directed learning which is more specific, but pretty similar. Essentially it’s perseverance and finding your own inner ninja to motivate you to want to learn.

This year, instead of just sharing resources with colleagues on our school conference folder, I’ve decided to polish up the lessons and powerpoints and post them online as well. I’m using Teachers Pay Teachers to distribute our lesson plans and posters, but using our main site, educircles.org to talk about stuff.

• Here’s the unit overview for the “Exploring the Six Cs” mega unit of epic proportions.
• And here’s a sneak peek at part of our introduction lesson with Fun Activities and Ice Breakers for the Six Cs Learning Skills.

Writing lesson plans… formal lesson plans… is like a blast from the past.

Remember them good ol’ days of teachers college where you would write out these huge lesson plans for marks… And then you got into the real world and discovered that between lesson planning, teaching, assessment, collaboration, parent communication, staff meetings, accommodations and modifications, duties, classroom management, professional development, and just trying to keep your head above water… you didn’t really have time to do detailed lesson plans.

So, it was kind of fun to put this package together. 23 pages, 29 slides, and several pots of coffee later, we got you!

• If you’re a seasoned veteran of the classroom, the slideshow will be enough, along with a quick glance at some of the discussion talking points in the lesson plan PDF.
• If this is your first gig in the classroom, or heck, you’re in that “five to thrive” stage of trying to make it to year five, the lesson plan has teaching tips, teacher prompts, and discussion ideas to help you get through the first week of school.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting a detailed lesson package for each of the individual Six Cs to follow up this fun ice-breaker week. Stay tuned!