Learning Life with Mrs. Worthington!

 Students in my 6th grade FACS class learned what it means to have a good day or a bad day. We listened to a story about a boy named Jimmy who had an interesting day! Some bad things happened, but also some really great things happened too!  Read about Jimmy here: Jimmy's Day We talked as a class about how Jimmy might feel when each positive or negative situation happened. How do we think Jimmy felt at the end of the day?  We then learned about self-esteem, confidence and what it means to be a bucket filler! If we know our self worth, believe that we are capable of moving past the hard days and helping others know that they are important too, we are the best kind of BUCKET FILLERS! We can mentally access our positive buckets on days that aren't going our way. We recognize that just because something not so great happens in first hour, it is our responsibility to not let it ruin the rest of our day. 

 No, that isn't a misspelling! I am "sew happy" to share the project my 5th graders have been working on. We recently just finished our unit on sewing equipment and were able to get to work on our first project!  I love to reuse items whenever possible so when I came across this project, I was really excited!  We made these dog bones from donations of denim from our community! We then turned around and gave them to a local animal rescue. A member from the organization came and gave us an idea of how we could help. Before she left we presented her with the bones we had finished, with a promise to send more as they were completed!  This is one of my students who said that I could use his picture for this blog post. He did a great job and is looking forward to donating this to a puppy who needs it! 

We are making "plarn" mats for those less fortunate than ourselves. We have begun researching which shelter we would like to donate our mats to. Here is one that we are looking at to gift our mats.  Our mats will be made of upcycled plastic bags and will provide a layer of protection from those who don't have a bed to sleep on. Since they are plastic, they are lightweight, durable and can be washed easily.  Hopefully, our mats will look a lot like this when they are finished:                                          Each mat can look different depending on the color of bags chosen to create the plarn from!  It feels great to do something good! 

I teach Family and Consumer Science and I can't wait to share the fun things that we do in class with you here! I hope that everyone can learn something from my student's adventures!  For this unit, we are learning about how to Upcycle, or make old things into useful items again, thus reducing the amount of waste that will go into our landfills. Not only will each class be keeping 16,000 plastic bags from going into a landfill, we can help those who are less fortunate as well!  Click here to see how we will make our mats!