Building Communities

This past week, we completed another one of our Masters classes, which was entitled Building Communities II.  We completed Building Communities I in the spring, which was a prerequisite for this course.  The purpose of the class was to learn strategies to help create communities within the classroom.  In this class, we learn by doing... our professor models community building by making our class into a community.

The final project assignment was to decorate a box.  The assignment was to decorate the outside of our boxes with words and pictures that describe us and define us.  The inside of the box was to be decorated with words and pictures that represent the things for which we are living... our goals and our dreams.  Seems simple enough, right?  Well, this box took hours and hours of thinking and cutting and pasting.

We set up shop in my apartment and began by reading our textbook to figure out what exactly our assignment was... 

Then, we began to assemble our boxes by painting them with our colors of choice...

Next, we began searching through all of my magazines to find words and pictures to use for our boxes.  I knew that keeping all of my old magazine issues would come in handy!

My apartment has never been as messy as it was this past week.  Looking at this picture makes me cringe.

Over the course of the week, we continued to cut and paste.  It took a lot of cleaning to get rid of the smell of the Mod Podge that we used.

Many great conversations happened over the making of these boxes.

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of last week, we spent the morning portion of our class at Eagle Elementary School.  Our Doane classroom wasn't conducive to sharing all of the icebreakers and energizers, so one of the girls in our class arranged for us to meet at her school.

Some of the activities we did involved some seemingly strange props...

...and gave us some good laughs...

Another one of our assignments was to create a lip dub video.  This also required us to find some creative props and costumes.

The end result was this video:



Overall, this was another good class.  The best part, however, was getting to spend another week with my good friends.