As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.
We are coming to the closing of the program and the resources below can help us with the transitions for your students and your athlete mentors.
Click here for the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Healthy Living from pages 37-40!
This month's video lesson may contain several big points:
Exploring We are Champions:
- Vocabulary
- Digging into what We are Champions embodies
- We are Champions in Action
- For your own learning
Your mentor will send a final video lesson, during which they might:
- Reflect on their own experience as a mentor
- Relive some highlights of the year
- Talk with the students about next steps in their goal setting practice
- Say goodbye, and close the mentoring relationship.
- While they have not been asked to provide a challenge, they might ask students to reflect, set new goals, or celebrate
You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:
- Planning for vocabulary development as needed
- Preparing a Frayer model to make Fair Play more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Perseverance. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.
There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.
Vocabulary Development
Finding the right words to say goodbye is never easy. Taking the time to explore not only the definition, but also the context, can help with the transition to the closing of their mentor relationship and into the next school year.
Celebrating the Progress:
End of year certificates will arrive by email and you are welcome to print them and host a closing celebration by giving students their very own signed certificate from their mentors! This is a great time to welcome special guests and families to join in the celebrations and festivities planned for May-June.
There are other ways to celebrate together like creating a class film festival by replaying your mentors videos! Revisiting your favorite lessons, making a thank you video for your mentor, creating slideshows of photos from over the year and their time together. You can also share competition films from your mentors in action and remember: Popcorn makes everything more fun (except for the custodian)!
Reflecting on the experience
You have all accomplished a lot together and this is a great time to think about how we are each different from the beginning of the year. Which lessons meant the most for each student and what do they plan to continue working on in the future? Revisiting each topic in discussion and in action can be a great way to reinforce what they have learned!
A year long mind map might be a cool way to reflect back and a giant wall sized one could be a shared writing project over several days and showcased in the classroom or the hallway. You can also create a CC “tree” as you can see in the photo above from Ms. Marcus’s 1st grade College Champions class as they host their mentor, Taylor Cooper. Each hand expresses what their favorite topic is and what having Taylor as a mentor means to them. After posting the hands as trees they write the topics throughout the trunk of the tree and it serves to remind and reinforce what students have learned over the year. 
Jennifer Regruth put together a year end video to share with parents. Other teachers do slide shows, or digital scrapbooks. Kids can make these as well. this was made using iMovie but you can do this with any other video creation platform. Highly recommended and fun! You can also send this to parents and share on your digital newsletter to highlight the amazing great work done throughout the year.
Students can do a written reflection, a Kagan style inside-outside circle or other sharing structures. They can also write letters to mentors or write a letter to their future selves. This exercise can help a person focus on what the future might look like and be very encouraging as they move through this transition into the ending of their relationship with their mentor. Making this transition is very important because of the uniqueness of the relationship from having a shared mentor experience with their classroom community and will create lasting memories to cherish and lessons to remember as they continue to develop and grow.
Extending the lessons from the year
Revisiting goals can be helpful during this time to reinforce that it’s a lifelong practice. You could try to work with students to create a new goal setting graphic organizer, or view another mentor’s video about goals for a fresh perspective. A mini goal setting party would be fun :)
This is also a great time to engage in another community service project extending the topics of community and leadership into the end of the year! What are different ways to engage your local and school communities?
Well, hello other mentors. Nice to meet you and hear your advice! This is an excellent time to hear different perspectives and other challenges that your fellow College Champion’ers did for their year. Here is a link to the College Champions YouTube playlist for all the videos made this year and last!
Closing the Mentor Relationship
Some ways to segue the mentor relationship can be to define what a “mentor” is and what it means to them. This can inspire them to seek out mentors in their own lives from their support group.
Talk about your own mentors and reflect what lessons will be helpful as they move into the next grade. Discuss when a person might need a mentor so they offer advice for their friends and to identify this when they get older.
Explore how to find a safe mentor, it is an important relationship that is formed so how can we know what influences we want as we continue to make decisions. This is a really important skill so that they can be aware and knowledgeable in the ways of identifying and reaching out to experts as they continue to grow and reach their dreams.
For your own learning
Take a moment to celebrate the incomparable advantage you’ve given your students by providing them with a strong mentor relationship (and being a mentor yourself!) as well as giving them invaluable resources to succeed in the future. Below there are several links that can help to recharge and rejuvenate your spirit and validate the stellar and dedicated work you do!
- Coming highly recommended from Heatherle there from rookiemag.com and their “Ask a grown person” series offering mentoring advice shared by celebrities and provides nice brain break from life.
- A longtime teacher, Christopher Emdin, now a science advocate and cofounder of Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. with the GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, Emdin offers a vision to make the classroom come alive.
- Below are three articles shared with our athlete mentors by our Athlete Mentor Coordinator, Andy Reimer, about transitioning to the next grade:
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