The scholastic blog that I was following stopped making new posts since June, so I decided to check out the Responsive Blog by Responsive Classroom, http://www.responsiveclassroom.org/blog. The last three posts were written by Margaret Berry Wilson. Her most recent post discussed how to create a community in the classroom. Margaret explains that “a strong foundation of togetherness and community” can create an atmosphere where students will want to come to school, they’ll want to take care of each other, take risks, and it fosters the social skills needed for school and life. Shared experiences, traditions, stories, and relationships leads to a community. The author suggests that teachers look to provide the class with “authentic shared experiences.” Some examples she had were create special traditions or rituals, like “disco clean-up time” at the end of the day; make learning fun and interesting; celebrate together, make a book of celebrations and add things like great math period; do something memorable; engage in a cause, like raising money for charity; and have a class pet.
The second post I read talked about how Elementary educators need to hold on to the vision of “what could be” for their students. The post talks about how teachers can sometimes get discouraged about students who do not seem to be making improvements, but how we must always look ahead and know that all of the time and effort that teachers have devoted into their students will be worth it. Every student has incredible potential and facing difficult situations with students is only part of the adventure in being teachers.
The last post by Margaret talked about decluttering the classroom. The statement “classrooms are full of stuff that is seldom or never used” is one that I hope to remember in my future teaching years. Often times teachers hold on to things because of scarcity of resources, thoughts like “someday I’ll use those for…”, because people give them things and they feel bad throwing out the supplies, or teachers inherit things from previous teachers. Cluttered classrooms are difficult to keep organized and can be obstacles for students to get work done. Margaret suggests having students help to clean up on the last day of school by sorting markers, crayons, colored pencils. Throw things out that aren’t necessary, share items with colleagues, and donate whatever else you can.
These three posts have helped me to look at many different areas of teaching. The author provided great tips on how to create a community in a classroom and how to deal with moments as an educator that can be stressful. I’ve taken some great information away from this blog, and will revisit it in the years to come.
I like the disco clean up idea. I plan to have students help me clean up. Especially sanatizing their desks to minimize spread of colds. I remeber in elementary school we used shaving cream one year to clean our desks and we played around with it making spaces and drawing words. So clean up time can be fun. I also like the idea of decluttering classroom. Organization is a skill students need to learn to be organized and an teachers need to model that in their classroom.
ReplyDeleteKeeping our classrooms organized will be a big part of classroom management. I'm glad that you brought up the idea of decluttering our classrooms. I've noticed that many teachers tend to become hoarders, especially if they've collected so many resources over the years. Even if it is too difficult to part with these items, one can still put in the effort to minimize the clutter and organize everything in a way that will make the information easily accessible for others, such as other teachers :D
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of creating meaningful shared experiences. What a great way to bond children together, foster respect, and build social and emotional skills through cooperation.
ReplyDeleteI have had that same problem with some of the blogs that I have looked at. There were no new posts for the last couple months. There seems to be a pretty high turnover rate for educational blogs. But the ones you did read seem to be very informative. I think your points about classroom community are right on. The more invested students are in the classroom the more they are likely to treat the classroom and others with respect.
ReplyDeleteAll this information will definitely be helpful while teaching! Creating a community is something I want in my class and staying organized will be very helpful for me too (I need to get better at it :) I really like the celebrations class book. I came across this book called "I'm in Charge of Celebrations" by Byrd Baylor and it's an awesome book! It's a story about a girl in a desert and how she finds many celebrations in her environment and makes her OWN holidays. I like the idea of reading this book, noting down special things each day, and making our own classroom celebration book :)
ReplyDeleteI love how you wrote about cleaning and decluttering a classroom. I haven't looked to much into how to keep children involved in the cleaning process but the idea of "disco clean-up time" sounds great for children of all ages. I also liked reading about the decluttering, my mom teaches and this past year she moved classrooms and it forced her to look at everything she had accumulated over the years and get rid of a lot. If she hadn't moved who knows when everything would have been sorted through. There are so many teachers that keep everything with the idea that "someday I will need it".
ReplyDelete