Time for Celebration - Minute to Win It!

The first quarter is over! Holy cow! The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, so my apologies for no blog posts! With the end of the first quarter came Benchmark testing (my kids rocked the Reading and have some work to do in Math...!), Report Cards, piles and piles of ungraded work that needed to be entered, meetings, conferences, etc. You name it, it's happening now! On the positive side, though, we also successfully had our first "Time for Celebration"! Every quarter, the kids have a target number of days that they need to stay on green (show good behavior) in order to earn this very valued reward. This quarter the magic number was 24! Of my 26 (that's right, TWENTY-SIX!) students, only 6 didn't make it!

So anyway, the day they'd all been eagerly waiting for finally arrived. After answering the question "What time is the celebration?" what felt like 100+ times, it finally arrived. I handed out the green tickets and we headed down to the gym. Every Time for Celebration has been a little different, but the kids have loved all of them just the same. This one was themed after the TV Show "Minute to Win It." The premise is that you have 60 seconds to complete the given challenge. At our celebration, there were 10 different challenges the kids could attempt.

My station was Ping-Tac-Toe. I have no idea if I had them playing it right, but they all enjoyed themselves and I still had a huge line when it was time to leave! There were 9 plastic cups taped together and the kids had to bounce the ping pong balls in one at a time to try and get 3 in a row. It turned into quite the workout for me picking up ping pong ball after ping pong ball, but I can use it, I'm sure. :) At one point, I was joking around with whoever was playing and one of my students looked up and said, "Ms. Wacek! I didn't know you liked to have fun!" Oh jeez. It's only the 1st quarter and they already think I'm a grinch.... :)

The other stations included:
- "Breakfast Puzzlers"(students had a minute to arrange cut up cereal boxes),
- "Balloon Bobble" (students had to keep 2 balloons airborne for a minute),
- "A Bit Dicey" (students had to stack 3 dice on top of a popsicle stick they were holding in their mouths)
- "Keep it Up" (students used an air pump to keep a feather airborne for a minute)
- "Tweeze Me" (students had to move 5 tic tacs from one bowl to another using only a tweezers)
- "Face the Cookie" (a cookie was placed on students' foreheads and they had to get it to their mouths using only facial muscles)... this was a lot of their favorites, go figure!

- "Speed Stack" (students had to stack and unstack 10 cups into a pyramid in a minute)
- "Egg Roll" (students had to roll a plastic egg down a hallway, around a cone, and back using the wind created from fanning a pizza box)
- "Fast Art" (students had 1 minute to color a "Time for Celebration" picture)

When the 40 minutes was up, the students chatted their way back to class and any onlookers would've thought they had each just been given $1,000 dollars with the smiles on their faces. Hopefully the enthusiasm was enough to motivate the 6 who spent the 40 minutes in a "booster session" learning about respectful behavior! That'd be enough for me, I'm sure! :)