Our Friend Mike is Brave

cross post from Shauna's blog

I feel very fortunate to have connected (and especially lucky to have connected my class) with Mike Moody, who co-hosts the Castle to Castle Disnerds podcast.

Mike and I initially got in contact when I contacted them about providing support to Edcamp Magic. They have tweeted with our class when we've been sharing our learning about gender. We have a Muppet in our class, Syd, who is ungendered and my grade 3/4 students have been very interested to learn about people who don't fit into the binary gender model.

After Mike tweeted at us, impressed about what we were learning, we tweeted back, asking them questions about preferred pronouns. Mike prefers "they", but understands that members of their family are still more comfortable using "he" when speaking about them.

We have been so impressed by Mike's braveness in sharing about their gender and facial disfigurement. When we recorded this video, we shared it with Mike (along with Dancing Man!) and they shared a song with us.


We listened to and really enjoyed Mike's song (also called "Brave"). When we requested a copy of the lyrics, they shared them with us. I was moved to learn that Mike wrote this song for a young friend with a similar facial disfigurement.

I've seen my share of hospital beds

(You've seen them all)

With the myriad of coloured cards

Crawling across the wall

They came to my bedside

With fresh sympathy

Did I ever realise,

"They're as scared as me..."?

They called me 'brave'

Was I brave?

Am I brave?

Were they brave?

I was just a little person once

Not anymore

Now, you're just a little person, yet

You're opening doors

That I could never have opened

When I was your age

Sitting back in that purple chair

Composed like a sage

They called me brave

But you are brave

You are brave

Oh, you are brave

They see my face, they stop and stare

You know it's true

I think I deal with it better every time

And so do you

'cause that's just us on the outside

And eventually they see

Friends have X-ray vision

They see inside

And that's quite brave

Your friends are brave

Your folks are brave

They're all quite brave

Your head has the scars

The bumps and the lines

You may think it's ugly

I think it's fine

It's your face to love

As much as mine's mine

And they all will too

If they take the time

The headlines will say

'It's All in the Head!'

And so take this

With your daily bread

You've come this far

So didn't you know?

You are brave

You know you're brave

I know I'm brave

Yeah, we're all brave

Your folks are brave

Your friends are brave

You and I are brave

We're all so brave

Thanks so much to Mike for being so open and willing to share with my students. We have been really moved and inspired by your bravery.

Puppet Pals News Show #3: Part 3

Liam and Robert talk about our inspiration, Walt Disney, and the reason we call our class an EPCOTclass:


Mariko wants to share about our French teachers - former and current!

News Show #3: Part 2

Keeping Healthy: Washing Our Hands


Introducing Two of Our Muppets

Norman Starts to Learn Math

Norman doesn't know anything about Math, but we're helping him to learn.

EPCOT Dream to EPCOT Dream Class

The year Walt Disney died, he was dreaming and sharing about his biggest dream ever: EPCOT. His dream of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow eventually got changed into a futuristic amusement park, but we watched the original Imagineer talk about his plans for a futuristic community and we were amazed by his vision.

In our EPCOT class, we've been working together to think about the roles of all members of a dream class and what a dream class looks like. We have had lots of visitors and volunteers in our class to watch how we learn in EPCOT class. The Gladiator Snails all have business cards and can tell you what being in an EPCOT class means to them. 

Gladiator Snails News Show

This is our FIRST blog post together!

OK. Well, this is a video that the Gladiator Snails made. - Grace
This is a video about what we have done these weeks in EPCOTclass. - Katie
So what we did is we took all the things that we have done and we basically made the people choose. And what thing they wanted to do for what we have done for these few weeks and then we put them into a video. - Oyster
We also set up lots and lots of things to make this video. We wrote on a paper and read it. We were writing in our Imagineering books. - Tom
An Imagineering book is a book that where we can't erase things, we can only create things. - Sophie
Imagineering means to imagine and engineer. - Toni



We think our news show was between a yellow and green light.

A yellow light and a green light is kind of like just showing how you think you did at something. - Isaac
A green light would look like if it was up to 10, it would be 10, the best. A green light means you can go like at a light in traffic.- Rowan

Here are some things we liked about our first news show:
-I liked how some people spoke very clearly. -Shane
-I like how they were being brave of speaking to the whole class. -James
-I like the stuff that we did. -Robert
-I liked how some people were looking at the paper and the audience at the same time. And, yeah. -Owen D
-Um, I liked that no one went like, "buh-buh-buh-BUHHH". -Hudson
-It was nice to share things with other people. -Tim
-I just liked it because I liked it. -Liam

In order to make our next news show a total green light, we will:
-Next time, we're going to try to look at the camera more than our pages. -Ava Cat
-We can try not to stutter as much and try to speak more clearly. -Isaac
-Not crumple paper! -Sammy
-Maybe we should practice more. -Gracie
-Well, I think we should look more at the camera, with your eyes down, you should still look at the camera. -Tommy
-We should talk louder and clearer and the people in the background should be quieter and the background should be a colour and not just the classroom. -Katie
-It's about props. Not many people brought props. I brought the Ketchup/Mustard and Pickle board. And, the background should be one colour and not distracting things. -Oyster
-Maybe we should actually plan out our things so we're looking at the cameras instead of our books. We should practice first. -Sophie
-I think we should put the whiteboard close with a table right in front of it. We can write things on the whiteboard big. - Indi
-Maybe we can have a long table with three newscasters just sitting there. - Lilah

Did you enjoy our news show? What did you like best? What should we do next time to make it even better? Leave a comment below!

Welcome to a Year of Bravery!

To my team who I will be meeting for the first time one week from today,

  I am looking forward to learning how to "Be Brave" with all of you this year. I have never taught grade 3/4. You've never been in grade 3/4. I have a lot of really exciting ideas I want to try out with you and I can't wait to start collaborating, communicating and creating with you.

  Tomorrow, I'm going to get to see all your names on one piece of paper and then I'll start moving the right amount of chairs into our classroom. On Tuesday, you'll notice that there aren't a lot of decorations in our room. That's on purpose. I've got some things around my desk area that will lead you to make some inferences about me, but I'm going to need you and your brains to help me decide what our learning space will look like.

  This year, I'm going to introduce you to a recipe that is proven to help students (and their teacher) succeed. It's simple. I ADD EGGS. That might sound weird to you right now, but by the end of the month, you'll know that recipe off by heart. You'll even understand what on earth it means!

  Our classroom has a name this year which represents how we'll work together. As you can tell from the blog title, we will be EPCOT - the Experimental Prototype Classroom of Tomorrow.

  You might have realized, I like big words and I like acronyms (that's a big word, and we'll learn what it means soon!). I also really like pushing myself and my students to try new things, take risks, stand up for ourselves and stand up for what we believe in. Because of that, our biggest class expectation this year is to Be Brave.

  I can't wait to start our year together. We are in for so many wonderful adventures, challenges and so much learning.

  I hope you're all enjoying your last few days of your holiday.

See you next week!

Your Lead Learner,
Shauna