Minecraft

For any of you that know exactly what Minecraft is, it's probably no surprise that many of our students are very "interested" in this.  They come dressed in Minecraft shirts, talk about playing Minecraft at home, and ask me if I have Minecraft on my iPad (I don't).  I've explained this before, but the curriculum we use, HighScope, encourages lesson planning around children's interests.  Well because of this, I have been racking my brain for the last few weeks trying to figure out how I could pull that interest in and target a language concept related to the needs in our classes.  After asking students what we could do for our Minecraft large group--which ended up being a lot of talk about zombies, bows & arrows, and skeletons (not a lot of help)--I finally came up with a lesson plan that I am actually really excited about!  So here is our learning card:

We will be transitioning to large group with a fun game of keep the Minecraft mobs in the air…

'Sad' Skeleton & 'Happy' Pig

Then we will look at different Steve heads.  Each one has a different emotion, so we are going to name the emotion and think of times we felt the same way:

Steve Heads

'Happy' Steve

'Sad' Steve & 'Scared' Steve

'Mad' Steve & 'Surprised' Steve

After we talk about each Steve, we will each get to wear a head and dance to some Minecraft music:

Miss Melissa as 'surprised' Steve

If we have time, we will match our emotional Mob-balloons with a Steve head who is feeling the same way.  

'Scared' & 'Happy' Pig, 'Mad' Zombie, 'Sad' Creeper,
'Surprised' Chicken, 'Sad' Skeleton, & 'Mad' Ghost

So, if your child comes home telling you they played Minecraft at school, please know that there were no video games involved in the fun!  :)  Here is our weekly handout.  It is a great one about working on emotions. 
UPDATE 8/6/14:  As many of you may be coming here from Pediastaff's blog, I wanted to provide you with the faces for my Steve Heads. I know they included one for an actual box head, but I thought I would provide all the emotions I was able to find and how I did it.  They are nothing special, but fairly easy to throw together.  I literally just googled "happy/sad/mad steve head" etc. and found a few I liked.  Then I blew them up in Word so that it was only the head, printed them off, cut them out, glued them onto a paper bag that was cut to fit the children's heads, placed some construction paper in brown or black to go to the edges, and then cut out the eyes.  Sorry I don't have pictures of all of this, but like I said, it is pretty straight forward.  You can find the printables for the "happy" Steve Heads, but they are pretty complicated and you would have to have a box for all the kids. That's why I thought the paper bag would work just as well.  Honestly, they were great! I only have them in a Word doc right now, but I will convert them to pdf and post those soon.  Mad Steve Head, Sad Steve Head, Scared Steve Head, Surprised Steve Head, Happy Steve Head.  This is the other Sad Steve Head I used.  For the emotional Mob balloons, I used this site and just gave them different emotions.  Happy Minecrafting...