Personal Space Camp

In first grade we read Personal Space Camp by Julia Cook.  Many times when students are transitioning to another space, there tends to be a lot of collisions!  In this story, Julia Cook reinforces how we can be respectful of each other spatially.  She uses outer space as a creative way to challenge students understanding as we follow Louis' hilarious journey through "Personal Space Camp".

Personal space is the amount of space you need to feel comfortable.  This changes based on the environment and population that is around you.  When you're around family members and close friends, you might need less space.  When you're around strangers, you might need more space.  When we're at school, we have to be respectful of each other so everyone feels comfortable.  I bring a bottle of bubbles with me to demonstrate this.  Each bubble represents how we each need a different amount of space to feel comfortable around each other.  When we get too close, we pop!

After the story, students sort out different scenarios to figure out if they demonstrated personal space or not.  We all were rolling around laughing at some of the choices, such as "putting my nose on people" and "licking people."  You can download the organizer I created here and the scenarios I used came from an activity packet created by Lisa Parnello on TeachersPayTeachers you can find here.