Cultivating Questioners

School is now officially underway! We’ve had four days of school, and things have been going pretty smoothly thus far. My new kids are eager and excited to be in school. I am enjoying their energy and getting to know them. What I’ve been most pleased with, thus far, is their kindness towards one another — they seem to want to help each other and are (mostly) kind and considerate towards each other. It feels promising!

This week, we’ve been spending time getting to know one another and starting our work for building a solid foundation for our classroom community. I’ve been doing this process very slowly, hoping that the most time we spend on it, the better off we will be for the entirety of the year.

In terms of starting to lay this foundation, we’ve done a couple of activities this week geared towards starting those conversations. So far, the students and I have talked about teachers and their jobs and what qualities they like teachers to have. They wrote their first journal entries to me about what their “dream” teacher would be like. Yesterday, we read the poem “Nasty School” by Shel Silverstein and talked about what might make such a school unpleasant (though we agreed it might be fun to go there for a day or two!) My students then used four of the five senses to describe what the best and worst classrooms smell like, look like, sound like, and feel like (in terms of both tangible touch and how they make our hearts feel.) We created charts based on a discussion that we had after the activity, which you can see below.

The next step in this process is to create a “vision” for our classroom by thinking about what our goals are for our classroom. We will then use our charts to develop our classroom “rules,” which will be the things that we all need to agree to do to make sure that our classroom is like the “best” classroom and not like the “worst” classroom. I am excited to see how this process goes in terms of increasing student engagement and buy-in for our classroom policies.