Inside Out

When you start at a new school and you're teaching a whole bunch of new classes, you can get easily overwhelmed with making new lessons, units and all the material that accompanies them. While I don't shy away from making my own materials from scratch (that Graphic Design degree does come in handy!), I am also a firm believer that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. So when I started to think about what to do for my next 6th grade unit and I saw that one of the topics, we should cover is puberty/ parent-child relationship, I decided that we could use the movie Inside Out (Pixar/Disney) as a basis for this topic. Most students are familiar with it in English, which is a plus in a language class, it's fun and engaging and it leaves so much room for connecting it to the kids' lives and creativity. I was hoping to find a starting point somewhere in a lesson some other teacher might have already started to develop. I was thrilled to find a health lesson, developed by Project Wellness in my search on Teachers pay teachers. But, of course, the unit was meant for Health and P.E. lessons, not German. So instead of downloading the PDFs and then having to change everything to German whilst destroying the incredible design of the original file, I took a shot and contacted Janelle from Project Wellness, to ask if I could have the original files instead. Of course, I ensured her that those files would be for editing purposes only and that I would neither sell nor give them to anyone else. We all know that we work hard on our material and that just ain't right! Instead I offered that I could send them back to her after I change everything to German and that way she could offer them in German from thereon after.

This was probably my favorite unit I have worked on with my 6th graders this year. They were engaged, had heated discussions, shared a little or a lot about themselves and produced beautiful end projects: Islands of Personality, which you can find here.


Some activities that we did were:

• Prior to watching the movie: Discussion about what is health/ well being
• During the movie: Journal entries for discussion questions, a writing journal was kept all throughout the unit and the students received a new question every class that I would stick in their journals after looking at the last entry.
• Group work: Posters "Your Emotions" and "Dimensions of Health"
• Individual Project: Sketch, plan and build at least three of your "Islands of personality" and the headquarters (iPad) that shows us the core memory and how it connects to your island

Below you can find the rubric that was used to grade these.

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Inside Out Rubric