This week, we are working on what it means to focus and how to pay attention in class. We started the lesson with a review of last week's topic: listening. To continue the discussion on listening, we read Julia Cook's "My Mouth is a Volcano," and discussed how Shout-out-itis hurts other peoples' feelings and the importance of listening even when we have something to share.
Next, we reviewed the listening rules along with the motions that go with that body part's job for listening. After that, we looked at a picture of a student named Caleb who was listening to his teacher explain a math problem. We identified what ways we could tell he was listening along with which listening rules he was following. We talked about a special tool we can use to help pay attention: our attentoscope.
We make our attentoscope by making circles with each hand and placing them over our eyes like binoculars. Our attentoscopes help us focus on what we want to pay attention to while blocking out distractions. We can use words like "pay attention" or "focus" to activate our attentoscopes, and once they are focusing, we can take our hands down and keep focusing on the teacher to learn.
