How can you create a powerful sense of community in your classroom? With the leisure of summer, we can ponder questions like this and plan ahead for next year.

As teachers of young children, we do not always get to see our hopes for our students fulfilled. We have to trust that we and their future teachers will make a difference, even if the rate of change is slow, and we don't see much progress before he or she leaves our direct influence. This can be challenging: it's easy to slip into believing that the kindergartner who rolls all over the carpet will never have self-control, that the defiance shown by a second grader predicts a troubled future or that a third grader's frequent meltdowns forebode a life of sadness.

Take time at the end of the school year to help children reflect on how they have worked to get to know each other, efforts they have made to be kind, and the friendships they have formed. Here are two tales of unique and unlikely friendships that you could use to start:

As the school year winds down, how will your students reflect on the hopes, dreams, and goals they set for this year? Many books could inspire this sort of reflection, including those I wrote about in "Read-Alouds to Inspire Hopes and Dreams" and "Revisiting Hopes and Dreams in the New Year." Here are some of my new favorites for this theme:
 

How has your class grown this year? What acts of kindness have they done for each other? What have they learned? What do you hope they will remember? Children's books can be great vehicles for exploring these sorts of questions during the last weeks of school.

Here are two great picture books you could use to launch children into remembering and making a timeline of their school year:

"Jaime isn’t lining up in the right place."
"Grayson said a bad word."
"Olivia hit me!"

I know from teaching young children myself how challenging it can be to face a seemingly endless parade of students reporting things to you as you’re trying to teach.

My colleague Caltha Crowe has been researching bullying prevention for an upcoming book, and as a result, my antennae are out for news on this topic. So, the other day when I heard the White House held a conference on bullying prevention. I checked out the website. I was most struck by this statement by President Obama:

I was sitting stock-still on the interstate in a rental car I needed to return before catching my flight home. As minutes ticked by the on the dashboard clock, I became increasingly worried. I hadn’t seen my little boy in four days, and if I didn’t make the flight, chances were good that I’d be in Massachusetts for another night. I started thinking about trying to make it over to the shoulder so I could get off at the next exit. Pros for this plan: I would make my flight.

A colleague of mine recently told me a story that reminded me of how powerful and positive an influence teachers can have—not just on their students,  but on students’ families as well. She said I could share it with you.

Before I moved to California, I had the pleasure of being part of a children’s book club—a group of adults who gathered together once a month to read and discuss children’s books. Last summer I got back together with those friends and learned about many recent publications, including a new favorite, Duck! Rabbit!, written by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld.

Here’s another children’s book that might come in handy early in the school year. Say Hello!, a picture book by Rachel Isadora, is a good one for when you are introducing Morning Meeting, especially greetings, to your class. In this book, Carmelita, her mother, and their dog Manny run errands in their city. As they do so, they greet friends and merchants in the languages they all speak.

The other day Jen Audley sent me a link to a blog entry about the first day of school that really got me thinking about the children who come to our classes and how thoughtful we need to be from the moment we meet them.