After careful deliberation, the Magical Minds identified their most important hopes and dreams for the school year. In the process, the children revealed honest and vulnerable parts of their souls - bringing their whole selves to our classroom. It is from this fragile place that we began our conversation on classroom rules.
"What do we need to do in our classroom to make sure everyone is able to enjoy pursuing their hopes and dreams?"
"What do we need to do in our classroom to make sure everyone is able to enjoy pursuing their hopes and dreams?"
The previous week, we had a practice at drafting rules for our Class Meeting. We brainstormed all the rules we could thinking: don't call out, don't lie down, don't interrupt, don't hit each other...
With guidance the Magical Minds turned their rules into positive statements: wait your turn, listen, sit up straight, we keep hands to ourselves. But, there were a lot of rules. How could we possibly remember all of them?
We started grouping and sorting our rules by their commonalities, and we were able to come down to three final rules.
With guidance the Magical Minds turned their rules into positive statements: wait your turn, listen, sit up straight, we keep hands to ourselves. But, there were a lot of rules. How could we possibly remember all of them?
We started grouping and sorting our rules by their commonalities, and we were able to come down to three final rules.
These were just our Class Meeting rules. When we started our conversation on our Classroom Rules, I wanted to help the kids think even bigger. Inspired by a video from BrainPop on rights and responsibilities, we created a list of our rights in the classroom. Their responses were both thoughtful and and thought-provoking:
Once we established our rights in the classroom, we repeated the rule-making process that we did for our Class Meeting: brainstorm, re-state in the positive, group and finalize.
As we grouped rules together, we decided we could summarize all our ideas under three "We Care" statements: "We take care about our community," "We take care of ourselves," and "We take care of our school's materials."
As we grouped rules together, we decided we could summarize all our ideas under three "We Care" statements: "We take care about our community," "We take care of ourselves," and "We take care of our school's materials."
Having written our rules, the Magical Minds drew pictures of what those rules sound like and look like.
What rules do you have at home?