Every school year, I take time during the first two weeks of school for the development of this year’s classroom rules. I started our discussions on the first day of school with the question, “Why do we come to school?” I listed all of the students’ answers on the board, and then said, “If these…
In Science class during the 3rd trimester, the 3rd and 4th graders have been working on self-directed long-term inquiry projects on ENERGY. Guiding students through a project like this was new for me, and I learned a lot along the way. We began the unit by exploring what students already knew about energy, and as…
Every month, a contingent of our students heads to The Admiral at the Lake for an ongoing service project with the residents of the assisted living community there. However, the Admiral was hit hard by the polar vortex this winter, with frozen and burst pipes; unfortunately, they are still recovering as they continue working through…
We start every day with Morning Meeting, where kids greet each other, share news, go over the day’s schedule and calendar and settle into the day. A couple weeks ago, I hung up a sign-up sheet for students interested in leading Morning Meeting. I put up nine slots (every Friday for the next nine weeks),…
This is not my first blog post about growth mindset. But I find that it comes up every year in different ways in my classroom; as I teach different groups of students, or different content, or different individuals, I continue to learn more about ways of promoting growth mindset, as well as potential barriers that…
To culminate our unit on narrative writing we wrote “small moment stories” which were detailed true stories from our own lives. To cap this off, my class had a writing celebration and invited family and friends to join us for a reading. The process leading up to the celebration – choosing a story, revising,…