Coat of Arms & Code of Conduct

Our amazing Coat of Arms! 

Having lunch on my birthday with a few mentors. 

This past week in YESS we got to work on one of our first art projects by designing a Coat of Arms. This project is tied to our Unit 1 goals of becoming effective communicators and being able to tell others about our personal goals and values as we work to build a sense of community in YESS. The worksheet asked each scholar to provide information on what they are good at now, what they would like to improve (we had to be very specific!), their most valued material and non-material possessions, their hopes for their education and career goals, and three words that they felt best described who they are.

We took a full day to make sure the information was very clear and precise; for instance, instead of saying that one would like to improve "math skills," I urged our scholars to instead write things like, "multiplying fractions" and "understanding place value when adding and subtracting decimals." By the second day everyone was very excited about their Coat of Arms and we began adding detail to make it a 3-D project.

A 2nd year mentor's project- so much detail! 

Tuesday was my birthday and I felt so much love and appreciation from all of our mentors and mentees. I had lunch with a couple of my guy mentors from 4th hour, and even had a student from last year return to give me flowers and Skittles! It was a wonderful way to celebrate. 

A great project from a 6th grade mentee.

On Wednesday we wrapped up the projects and did a gallery walk and short presentation. Afterwards we displayed each one in our room so that every single YESS scholar is represented. This also gives all of our scholars a chance to look and understand the different people who are in our program.

Gabe did a great job on his Coat of Arms project.

Thursday was a very important day as we finally set our classroom code of conduct by writing up a working document that we all signed. We are going to display them this week (we had a few scholars out who will need to sign it this week!).

We ended our week by working on our planners and general organization on Friday. We are doing Weekly Reflection logs this year at Shaw and it is my intention that every single YESS scholar has a working planner. Once we finished we had about 15 minutes to unwind and play a few games together.

It was a great week and next week we are really looking forward to hosting our presidential elections!