Riverside Township Public School District

December is officially here, and with it, loads of cheer surrounding the arrival of winter, the upcoming holiday seasons, and, of course, the World Cup. This week, the first December Lesson of the Week reflected all of that cheer, and the activity observed was just as Merry and Bright as Ms. Downey's classroom. Ms. Downey began her sixth-grade reading class with a soccer-themed social-emotional learning warmup where students had to choose a particular soccer ball they resonated with at that moment. Students listened to soft-playing music in the background while they worked on providing explicit explanations for their choices. In conjunction with that activity and the cheerful theme, students also worked on a parts of speech activity. They had to correctly identify and categorize vocabulary by parts of speech to successfully produce a colorful picture upon completion. Ms. Downey plans to use these visual learning outcomes to decorate the hallways with the language arts work to go along with the math-mystery graphs that already "deck the halls."