Do you think that without looking, your students could name your classroom's rules? Most teachers establish classroom rules at the beginning of the year, and many devote time to modeling and practicing rules with students in the first weeks of school. After that, however, the amount of time spent thinking about what rules mean and how to live by them often drops off dramatically.
Are you looking for a strategy to help your students navigate particularly tricky times of day, such as transitions, recess, lunch, or dismissal time? Try making a "looks like/sounds like" chart (often called a T-chart) or a "looks like/sounds like/feels like" chart (aka a Y-chart) with them. This activity and the discussion that surrounds helps students envision the positive benefits of changing their behavior, and it heightens their understanding of what has to be done.
At this time of year, people who work in schools often start feeling a bit frayed. Now that the school year is well underway, the "honeymoon period" of the first weeks is long gone. Students may be testing limits a little more, seeming less satisfied with tasks they are assigned, a bit quicker to get into quarrels with each other.
Have you noticed that you're not feeling quite as positive as you were a few weeks ago? If you are feeling this way, chances are good that your students have noticed.
"Young engineers, it looks as if you have mastered skyscrapers. Now you are ready for the challenge of building a bridge!" said the teacher to a small group of children in a first grade science classroom I recently visited.
These days, curriculum often recommends using "partner chats," "turn-and-talk," and other one-on-one conversation strategies to help students reflect on and deepen their learning. Although it may seem like a simple thing, chatting with a partner involves a complex set of skills that many children do not come to school with: listening and speaking in turn, staying on topic, and not monopolizing the conversation, to name just a few.
Are there invisible children at your school? A recent series of comments on the Responsive Classroom Facebook page got me thinking again about how many children go through their school days feeling unnoticed and unseen, and about how important it is for all children to feel significant in school.
I never loved the first day of school. My teaching depended so much upon knowing my students, and until I got to know them, I never felt entirely comfortable.
Having said that, I do have many happy first day memories, including a funny story from my first day of teaching kindergarten.
One night this week the national news included two snippets related to our country’s schoolchildren: one I found very discouraging and the other really heartening. The discouraging news was that one in three American children now lives in a household where no parent is working full-time. The heartening news was that in Joplin, Missouri, school opened on time.
When I started teaching, I always planned way too much for the first days of school. It took me a while to learn to make the first day of school a comfortable, successful day—for my students and myself.
Once I became more experienced, I pared down my first day plans to just a few things: getting to know each other, learning some procedures, and having fun—all activities that helped us start building strong relationships. That was much more important than getting that first page of math done and sent home.
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:
