Flowing with a Theme

I have spent a lot of time in recent presentations talking about establishing flow (the positive psychology concept) for ourselves and our students by incorporating interests. Flow can also be considered to refer to contextual flow within or across sessions which has been shown to facilitate efficacy. So, to that end, a few activities I whipped up on the theme of May the Fourth Be With You (International Star Wars Day); I realize this is past but you can always observe later, or next year!

Read and discuss Darth Vader and Son (Jeffrey Brown) or another in this series. Many of the single panel cartoons are also usable from Google Images. These cartoons are great context to do picture interpretation of what is implied in the scene, or discuss humor (hyperbole, irony).

Take a field trip to Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in Google Earth (just search for the location in either Disney park). Students can take turns "driving" via cursor control or in person, make observations and comments, or look closely at the setting (enter Street View by dragging over the Peg Man...my group observed a family wearing masks and inferred the shot was taken during the pandemic). You can also look for POV videos of any of the rides on YouTube which can lead to further observation, commenting, and narrative language.

Use a post such as this one to read about Star Wars' droids (like the EET, they prompt green-group, blue-do, but also stories). My group is now sketching our own droids in Jamboard. I love that Set Background> + > Google Image Search lets you quickly set a contextual background and show students how to do so also.

This post on Instagram also had us doing some fun picture interpretation. "Oh, what do you think the artist wanted to focus on here...?" prompting discussion of characters, setting, representations (e.g. Kylo Ren in Last Jedi with no helmet on looking more human).

Finally, this clip of Yoda generated some good discussion and critical thinking about growth mindset: