My Many Misadventures of Teaching: "Most Inspiring Students" Award Goes To...

...Liliana, David, and Hawke! These three are in my morning class. Today, I had us go out and run one lap before they could start recess. During recess, these three kids kept running! They ran 6 laps, or a mile and a half each. Then we came in and they announced that they wanted to start a running club during recess. Monday through Thursday during both morning and lunch recess, they plan on running as long as they can. Well, I think this in and of itself is pretty awesome. However...

...we stepped it up a little bit. I told them that I had heard of a group that was attempting to finish running the miles that were left unfinished in the Boston Marathon. All those runners who were unable to finish because of the bombing left a total of over 8,000 miles uncompleted. (Visit this facebook page for more details). As soon as they heard about this, they wanted to know how many miles they had run and if they could add it to her project. So we added them up. They ran a total of 9.25 miles this morning. But...

...It doesn't stop there. My kids are seriously amazing. Liliana, David, and Hawke decided that they wanted to keep track of how many miles they ran during the week with their running club so we could contribute to the Run for Boston project. We spent the next 45 minutes forgetting about the lesson I had planned and worked together as a class to figure out how we could make this work. We set up a system of tallying our laps as we ran and are even having an art contest to see what picture would best work on our poster. We want to get the whole school involved if we can. It's going to be a lot of work, but they are so excited about this new project. I've never seen them so excited and work together so well. We found a way to start today during our lunch recess and my kids got the word out to the other third grade students. We had SO MANY join us in our run. They took care of everything by themselves today and it went off so well!!!! After just today's running we have a combined total of 66.5 miles run! These third graders are truly amazing!!

This has also helped wrap up the Leader in Me program that we've been introducing this year. We are trying to encourage the students to step up and become leaders in the class, school, and community. During our discussion, we were amazed to find that we were using all 7 Habits at once and we felt so good about it!

Here are some pictures I took as I came out at the end of lunch to see how things were going. They were all so happy to help show their support. Today was such a great and inspiring day! I am so proud to know and teach these incredible children.