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I've officially survived the first week of school and it was a whirlwind of a week! For those not familiar, I am an English kindergarten teacher at a bilingual French-American school and this is my first year teaching here. I've taught for 5 years, and many of those years with the littles, but working at a bilingual school is a career first for me. Needless to say, I loved it!
I have three classrooms this year, which means I have 42 kinders in my care. 42! But, it naturally came easier than expected and I am looking forward to this year so much more.
With that being said...
This first week of school was all about establishing those new routines and procedures, a lot of modeling and practice, and discussions about expected behavior. But, this year our school is taking a new approach to this...
Creating the classroom rules together.
Every year as a teacher I've always found importance in having my students create the classroom rules together as a unified effort. It's always been amazing to see their responses and how much they already know about how to behave at school. So, why not tap into that resource instead of repeating things they're coming into kindergarten already knowing?
Over the summer I, along with my colleagues at school, participated in a teacher training for Responsive Classroom. As a part of this instructional approach, there was a section about establishing the classroom rules together; making students more accountable and included in the process all year long. RC is new for my colleagues, but thankfully I've had a number of years teaching this way and therefore have been able to help in implementing a number of new procedures.
This first week, I loved co-teaching and working alongside my new kindergarten team in having these discussions with our classes about why we come to school, what they're most excited for this year, and deriving categories to iron out what our classroom rules would be. Here's a peek at some of that process!
DAY 1: Why do we come to school?
Read Aloud: I Am TOO Absolutely Small for School (Charlie & Lola)
The Charlie and Lola series are a new one for me, but I am so grateful to my preschool colleagues (in France, and at our school, kinder is the final year of preschool) who have shared some pretty amazing books and curriculum with me! This story follows Lola, as told by Charlie, as she prepares to go to school for the first time. She is nervous about what she'll experience and comes up with silly excuses as to why she doesn't need to go - often very relatable reasons shared by our kinders.
They loved it and found Lola to be so silly! I chose this story in particular to go along with the first step in our classroom rules creation, which was our question: why do we come to school? This is an easy question to answer by our littles, but often one that gets overlooked and rarely related to why our rules are what they are. By having this discussion up front, it leads to further discussions about behavior and throughout the year we can connect back to why we ask students to behave - it's so they can learn!
DAY 2: What are your hopes and dreams for this year?
Read Aloud: The Pigeon HAS to go to School.
On the second day we reviewed what we had discussed the day prior and why we come to school and why it's important. The following day we asked our classes to think about what they're most excited for this year. Kindergarten is the final year of preschool and a year with the biggest transitions! Many shared that they were excited to make new friends, to paint and color, to learn about numbers, and to play outside.
I chose to read a Pigeon story because, like Lola, he was feeling nervous to go to school for the first time and it's such a silly read. This was another hit with all of my classes and found them really relating to Pigeon, but also finding his fears and anxieties to be silly since they know school is nothing to be afraid of!
We rounded out these last two days by sharing that the next day we would be diving into how the class can achieve BOTH learning and having fun at school.
DAY 3: Making Good Choices
After much discussion the first two days, I was eager to get my kiddos working and practicing some key writing skills - beginning with tracing.
Read Aloud: No, David!
Now that students have discussed and thought through why we come to school and what they're excited about learning this year, I began lessons that would connect the two in terms of how we/they could achieve that through their actions and words.
I read them the story, No, David! by David Shannon - a very popular read with the littles. I connected their understanding from the previous days by asking them to think about David's actions while I read the story. Of course they picked up on how mischievous he was being, but the important lesson was towards the end when David's mom hugged him and said "Yes, David, I love you." We had a short talk about how us teachers still love our students even when sometimes mistakes in behavior happen in class. This seemed to really resonate with them.
Categorizing Behaviors
One of the objectives for kindergarten is the ability to categorize, or group, items by similar and dissimilar qualities. This was a great opportunity for us to take what they've been learning all week and summarize it in a visual way using Carolyn's Creative Classroom's No, David resource on TpT! I appreciated how easy it was to prep for the day's lesson!
After we read the story I clipped a few of the visual cards provided in the download (ones that most pertained to the behaviors we've already been seeing this week) and had students come up to the board to place them in either the thumbs up or thumbs down column. Afterwards I dismissed them to their tables to begin practicing using their materials such as pencils and markers. They traced the sentence, "I can make good choices at school" and colored a picture of them making a good choice - using our anchor chart as a reference.
DAY 4: Good Choices vs Bad Choices Sort
Read Aloud: Have You Filled a Bucket Today?
We made it to Friday and what a week of learning it had been!
To wrap up our week discussing and crafting our classroom rules I decided to break out my favorite book about bucket filling. Instead of using it with a bucket filling lesson, I tied it into what we were already doing in class and decided to use it more as a reference (aka "are you being a bucket filler?"). Being a bucket filler is also one of the cards we categorized the previous day with our No, David! activity and today we bridged that learning by explaining what a bucket filler and dipper is.
After reading the story with the class I wanted to make the anchor chart we did together the previous day as a whole group a little more concrete. So, I used this free resource from Melissa Moran on TpT that had students practice cutting, pasting (dot, dot, not a lot!), and sorting, or categorizing, good behaviors and bad behaviors. I modeled for them how to cut and paste and went over each picture before dismissing them to their seats to get started.
And that was a wrap of our first week! I feel as though my kiddos did a great job with our discussions, participating in creating the classroom rules, and working independently to complete their work. I feel like this will be a great year!
Happy teaching and enjoy your weekends!
