Team Building And Cooperative Learning With Robotics
My students need the books, Bullying in Schools, and Wonder, and a LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit to learn about cooperative learning and working together without bullying.
When students learn to work together without being bullies, they are learning lifelong skills. Some students are the last to be selected when kids form teams. I want to end this form of bullying by teaching my students how to work together and help each other, instead of excluding others.
I teach a fantastic group of fifth grade students at school in southern California, where 50% of the students qualify for free, or reduced price lunch.
We are a busy, engaged classroom, and my students thrive when we have hands-on projects to help them learn the fifth grade curriculum.
This year I will be adding robotics to our classroom studies. After my two-day training this month, I will help my students form teams where they will work together to learn how to build and program robots.
I plan on using this project to help students learn to be kind and accepting of each other. My students range from highly gifted to autistic, and some our struggling to learn the fifth grade curriculum. All of my students need to learn to work together and help each other in a classroom that is free from bullying.
My Project
By reading the book, Bullying in our Schools, and the book, Wonder, my students will have many discussions about how people feel when others reject them or make fun of them. In Wonder, a boy is born with genetic defects, and students often hurt his feelings, just because he looks different. By discussing how words hurt, we can work towards keeping our classroom and school a bully free zone.
The robotics kit will help me create robotics teams, so my students can learn to work together and be kind and helpful to each other.
The sixth grade class will also be learning robotics with kits they already have, so having my class interact with the sixth grade class in a positive way will help students learn to be accepting of each other, and put an end to bullying.
Students need to mix together and learn to work with other people's differences and similarities.
By having a classroom robotics project, where everyone gets to participate and share ideas, my class will learn how to work cooperatively and be kind to one another. Your support of this project will help build bully-free citizens for life.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Kugelman and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
