There are a number of ways that we build community at the beginning of the year in third grade. We play getting to know you games, establish and practice classroom routines, create 'personality portraits' to share about ourselves, and we spend time reviewing playground norms to make recess a fun and safe experience. We talk about our hopes and dreams for the year, and then we use those hopes and dreams to create classroom rules.
Working as a group to create classroom rules helps students' to feel that the rules are relevant to them and they are more invested in following them. To begin this process, we started with a brainstorm of possible rules, which included specific rules such as one person talking at a time to more general rules like, "never give up." We then worked together to sort the list of rules into four categories that encompassed all of the ideas. Condensing the rules into just four was important so that they clear are easy to remember. In our class, the rules we settled on are:
- Be in control of yourself
- Help and respect others
- Take care of classroom materials
- Try your hardest and do your best work
Our hope is that by having rules that are fairly general, they will help students to make good choices about how they treat others and the classroom materials without feeling that they have to remember a huge amount of specific rules. So far these have worked well as a guide for all of us as we line up for recess, play math games with a partner or have a class wide discussion during morning meeting or social studies.
There are a number of ways that we build community at the beginning of the year in third grade. We play getting to know you games, establish and practice classroom routines, create 'personality portraits' to share about ourselves, and we spend time reviewing playground norms to make recess a fun and safe experience. We talk about our hopes and dreams for the year, and then we use those hopes and dreams to create classroom rules. 
Working as a group to create classroom rules helps students' to feel that the rules are relevant to them and they are more invested in following them. To begin this process, we started with a brainstorm of possible rules, which included specific rules such as one person talking at a time to more general rules like, "never give up." We then worked together to sort the list of rules into four categories that encompassed all of the ideas. Condensing the rules into just four was important so that they clear are easy to remember. In our class, the rules we settled on are:
Our hope is that by having rules that are fairly general, they will help students to make good choices about how they treat others and the classroom materials without feeling that they have to remember a huge amount of specific rules. So far these have worked well as a guide for all of us as we line up for recess, play math games with a partner or have a class wide discussion during morning meeting or social studies.
No comments:
Post a Comment