5 Tips to Help Your Students Love School

I am writing this post for Cassandra from Mrs. 3rd Grade to celebrate her 30th birthday!!!

To celebrate, I am going to share 5 EASY tips to help your students love to be at school! Every year my #1 goal is to make sure all my students are all happy, loving school, and growing as a person. I truly believe that has to come first! 

Here are 5 simple rituals will help you do just that and will be easy for you to sustain! They aren't behavior tricks but instead rituals that help your students grow in character.

Tip #1: Friday Messages - Teacher to Student
Every Friday, write a message to your students! This message could include praise about what they did well, build excitement for learning experiences to come, or any other positive news you wish to share. The students get so excited to read the note each Friday morning, and this little tradition contributes to the overall positivity of the classroom environment! (If you forget, a student will be sure to remind you!)

Tip #2: Bucket-Filling
Read How Full is Your Bucket? and introduce the concept of "Bucket-Filling" to your students. Brainstorm ideas for how they can fill their peers' buckets each day. Then, nominate a student who stood out as a role model to be the "Bucket-Filler of the Week." This student will try his/her hardest to be a role model all week and look for a student to nominate for the next week. I display this child's picture in the classroom. For a free classroom visual, click here.

Tip #3: #You Matter Board - Student to Student
Students use a sticky note to write a meaningful compliment or comment to a classmate and end the note with #youmatter. Then, when you get a free moment, read them aloud and have the student take it home to share with his/her family.

Tip #4: Social Emotional Learning
We often take time at the beginning of the year to read social-emotional books but then get so busy with curriculum, we don't continue to carve out the time. Reading social-emotional ALL year long is SO key. Don't be afraid to take time away from other subjects to have these discussions. Social-Emotional books will help you bring up issues in class meetings that will acknowledge feelings students often have. It will give you an opportunity to have growth mindset discussions that you can refer back to when they are persevering through challenges. It will give you the opportunity to discuss coping strategies to help students become more resilient. It will help you teach your students to take on the perspective of others and think how they feel. And much MORE! Classroom read-alouds and discussions add so much heart to the community.

Tip #5: Share it Out with Families
I used to write weekly newsletters... Then, when I made a class website, I started updating the website each week and emailing the update to the parents. All of this became VERY time-consuming, rarely involved the students, and I'm not sure how many parents read all this information. So, while this sounds overwhelming, it's such an EASY switch... I now send a DAILY email to the parents. However, I write it with the students at the last 5 minutes of the school day. We call it our "Happy Email." A student calls on 5 classmates to share a highlight from our day. I type it on the board. Then, I add anything I wish to the email and send it off. The students leave each school day with excitement for their parents to read the email. The parents LOVE this connection because it gives them talking points with their child each night. It helps bring the love of learning home each day and increase students' excitement for school the next day!

I wish you a wonderful 2016 teaching and learning!

Social Emotional Lessons

 Linking up with my sweet friend Diana at My Day in K for some BTS advice!

Social-emotional lessons all year long are KEY to a happy, healthy classroom. Those social-emotional skills are just as important as academic skills, if not more so! Here are a few ideas of social-emotional activities for your first week. Filling your first few weeks with social-emotional lessons will help create a warm-caring learning environment.

It is helpful to do both "all about me" type activities and classroom community building/friendship lessons to help celebrate individuality but also bond students together like a family. 

Read How Full is Your Bucket? and Have You Filled a Bucket Today? Then, create a chart about how to be a bucket-filler at school. Invite students to share their bucket-filling acts or acts of kindness continuously and celebrate them! For more bucket-filling ideas, click HERE.

Take a white poster board. On the back of your poster board, divide the board into however many squares as students. Number them for your reference. Cut them out in the shape of puzzle pieces. Have your students each decorate a piece with drawings/words that relate to them. Have a discussion about teamwork and model being a good teammate. Then, have students work as a team to assemble the class puzzle! Hang it up somewhere to remind the students - though we are all different, we all fit together as one team!

Study, model, practice, practice, and practice Whole Body Listening!  I make a poster using real pictures of my students modeling how to listen with each body part. We put this poster up in our whole group space all year! It's a quick and easy visual that I can easily point to when students need redirecting.

Have you seen the so popular toothpaste activity? This is where you have the students pour out a tube of toothpaste. Then, ask a child to try to get the paste back into the tube. When they are unable to do it, explain that it's easy to get words out, but it's not easy to take them back. Later in the year to review this idea, you can use a piece of paper. Have the students crumple up the paper. Then, when they open it, ask them to get it back to it's smooth original form. They will be unable to get the wrinkles out. Draw the conclusion that words can leave forever scars that you are unable to take back.

Have your class develop a NAME that describes them. For example, my class name is "The Knights of Kindness." We make a sign/poster to go outside our door. I give each student a heart and they write something they love about our class on the heart. We glue all 20 some hearts on. Then, we develop a class MOTTO. The motto is a phrase that describes what you do! Our motto is "Overflowing buckets with kindness." We make a poster with a big heart in the middle. The students put their hand print in the heart, and I write the motto on the outside. We sign our name/motto on all things that relate to our class. It forms unity!

Teach your students how to be a good partner! You can play basic math games throughout the first week that everyone can play. Use this as a time to model, practice, and reflect on good partner strategies!

Be sure to check back at the blog next week - I'll be sharing about tattling and conflict resolution!