Berkeley Leader

Whitesville Elementary had quite a “renovation” last week.

If one were to have walked the hallways last Friday, they would have thought they entered a concert venue. Or a rave. Or a real-life version of the board game, “Candyland” – it all would have depended on what hallway they ventured down.

October 21 was Rock Your School Day, which is part of Get Your Teach On, a professional development that Whitesville Elementary is new to following this year. Principal Katie Taie said her school’s leadership team learned more about the initiative at a conference earlier this year.

“Get Your Teach On is about motivation for teachers…to get the students engaged,” she said. “It’s motivation and engagement for students – and really for teachers, too.”

Rock Your School is celebrated around the world and is a designated day for teachers to incorporate some fun and interesting teaching methods – maybe ones that they normally would not get to do – and get students engaged and excited about learning. The goal is for teachers to step out of their comfort zone and do something different, and make it a special day for students.

Teachers are encouraged to go as small as they want or as big as they want – “but, of course, my school did ‘big,’” Tai said.

Tai said there is only one designated Rock Your School Day through Get Your Teach On but her school has enjoyed it so much that they are going to do a second event in the spring because her teachers have enjoyed it so much – and Whitesville Elementary truly went all out in terms of adopting different themes for the day.

The kindergarten hallway was completely transformed into “Candyland,” and teachers on the hall did different activities for their classrooms. For example, Mari Johnson’s kindergartners played the board game in their reading/math groups to work on counting and color words. She also played candy-themed songs throughout the day for students to rock out to like “I Want Candy” and “Candyman”.

The second-grade hallway was kept very dark…so that the students could better enjoy all the neon glow sticks and black light décor. Brittany Castle’s second-graders played bowling and ring toss games while working on writing and reading lessons with flashlights. Her students also made glowing slime later in the day, among a lot of other activities.

The upper grade levels’ hallway was also pretty dark – aside from a nifty strobe light that was parked outside one of the classrooms. The fourth and fifth-graders had testing for half the day but still got to enjoy some fun “rock’n’roll”-themed activities.

Since Halloween is around the corner, some teachers did some fun “spooky” activities. Brittany Kirkpatrick transformed her classroom into a bat cave, and her third-graders did bat-related activities all day with the help of neon highlighters and black lights. As part of a literacy lesson, another class of third-graders made giant pieces of “candy”, picked an adjective, and then wrote synonyms and antonyms for that adjective on either side of their artwork. First-grade teacher Kayla Beard created an escape room activity entitled “Escape the Haunted House,” where students had to work together in groups to complete math review tasks to win the reward of escaping the haunted house.

October 21 also happened to be Real Kids Wear Pink Day for the school, so lots of students wore pink to show their support for breast cancer awareness.

Check out more photos in the photo gallery.

Monica Kreber

kreberm@bcsdschools.net

Original source can be found here.