Not a Box Genius Hour -- Week 2

After last week's Not a Box genius hour time, we were excited for what was coming this week!

Day 1
When looking for activities to go with the "Not a Box" book, our teacher did some searching in the internet.  She found a website that talked about doing yoga as one of the activities.  Now, our teacher told us that she knows nothing about yoga and has never even tried it herself.  So she decided to talk to a friend of hers that teaches yoga.  Isabelle agreed to come in and teach us some yoga poses, based on the book. 

We started by lighting some candles, turning the lights off and focusing on our breathing.

Next, about half of our class was given cards with different poses on them.  They showed us the pose and we made suggestions about what we thought each pose looked like.  Then, we got to try the pose ourselves.

Here's a video of us doing the warrior pose.

Next, came the "mountain"...just like the bunny in the book did!

We loved doing the "elephant" pose!

 

Here are a few more we tried.  What do the poses look like to you?

 

The airplane pose was tricky!  You had to have really good balance.



But, our favourite was the lion.  Here us roar!

To end our yoga session, we just laid quietly on the floor, trying to clear our mind and stay as still as we could.  It was harder than you might think!

Thanks Isabelle!  What an awesome experience!

Day 2
Today we finally got to touch a box!  Yay!  We started the class with our teacher showing us a flattened box.  We worked in groups of about 4 kids and she challenged us to build it as quickly as we could.

Then we got to play Charades in our small group.  In Charades you act out something, without talking and then others have to guess what you are doing.  For our game of Charades, we had to include the box in some way.  Mrs. Cooper-Shand showed us how it's done.  Can you figure out what she is doing?

Here we are giving it a try...what are we doing?  How are we using the box?

Here's a video of one of our groups doing charades:

To end this "Not a Box" lesson, our teacher shared the video of Caine's Arcade with us.

We were amazed at what Caine created and how, with a little help from a friend and social media, he was able to share his genius with so many people. 

Here are some of our thoughts about this video:

Oops...the last l in cool got erased! :-(

We are now so excited to see what cool things we (3C) can create with a little collaboration!

We were wondering...

Have you tried yoga?
Have you played Charades?
What did you think about the Caine's Arcade video?

Not a Box Genius Hour -- Week 1

We were surprised this week, when our teacher added something new to our schedule -- Genius Hour.  We had so many questions about it but she told us we would just have to wait and see.  We were quite surprised to find out that our principal is going to also be teaching us during Genius Hour.  This week, we did Genius Hour on two different days and for many of us, it was the best part of the week.  Here's what we worked on...

Day 1

Photo Credit: Zen Pencils

We started out by reading this quote and talking about what a genius is.  Here are some of our thoughts...

Then our principal read us the book "Not a Box" by Antoinette Portis. 

Photo Credit: Amazon

 

In the book, a bunny uses a box in lots of different ways.  On each page, we predicted what we thought the box was.



On this page, we thought...

- it's "Bunny Liberty" (Landon)

- it's bunny President--"Barack O Bunny" (Tristan)

 

But, actually it was the bunny climbing a mountain!



On this page, we thought...

- he's a robot (Breanna)

- he's wearing a space suit and going to the moon (Chacie)

On this page, we thought...

- he's on the Titanic, looking for the iceberg (Logan)

- he's in a war tank (Kade)

 

Throughout the book, the bunny kept saying that "it's not a box!"  He always used his imagination and would think of creative things the box could be.

 



In our next activity, all of us were given a few different rectangles and squares.  We were challenged to glue them into our Genius Hour notebook and turn them into our own "not a box".  We could draw, add details and write about our "not a box".  Here is some of our work...



One of our classmates tells you about his "not a box" and what the book is about.

What an awesome start to this project...we are loving it already!

Day 2
To start our lesson today, we reviewed the story by watching this video.

Then we had some fun acting out all of the things the bunny imagined the box was.  Here we are climbing a mountain...

Then we had to be a firefighter...

Being robots was next...

Next, we talked about what the phrase "think outside the box" means.  It was a good conversation that involved these ideas...

 

The song, "Think Outside the Box" also gave us other ideas about what this phrase means.

In the last part of the lesson, we were all given a Dr. Seuss book.  He definitely "thinks outside of the box" and we looked at the pictures to find examples of this.  We then got to share what we found with the class.  In this video, one of our classmates tells about the picture she found.

We can't wait for next week's Genius Hour "Not a Box" lessons!

We were wondering...

Have you read this book before?
What would your "not a box" be?
How do you "think outside the box"?