It has been quite awhile. I hope you missed my posts on what's happening in our classroom. One thing that I have been wanting to share is on our tireless work on building community and discussions on how we can become good citizens (Today, the classroom. Tomorrow, the world!) Our students are very young so picture books, role playing and discussions truly help them the big concepts that we talk about in the classroom.
Some of the activities we have are:
- Morning Meeting- At this time, we gather as a community (as a family). We greet each other, sing songs and share news and our feelings of the day ahead. It sets our tone of the day, in which we strive to focus it around respect, trust, love, community building and problem solving.
- Read Aloud Discussions- This is my most favorite activity. Reading books to the children lends to an endless possibilities of extensions and activities. I have acquired a great list of socio-emotional book list mostly thanks to parent support and donations. In the pictures below, we read an out of print (?) book, "Andrew's Angry Words" by Dorothea Lachner. It is about a boy who used angry words and it followed him the whole day. It was also acquired by the people around him. To solve this problem, he chose to use nice words and he saw the angry word magically disappear. It was then replaced by nice words. The activity we did after this read aloud was very powerful. We talked about anger and hurtful words and wrote some of them down. We then decided that these words did not have any place in our classroom nor at Suder. As a class, we marched out of our classroom and I threw the words away and can never come back! The children loved this activity!
- Second Step- As I have shared previously, Second Step is a socio-emotional curriculum that Suder uses school wide. We have been using this in our class and the children love the engaging lessons and discussion we get from each activity. In the picture example below, you can see that the children are discovering that everyone can feel differently in a given situation. I gave a scenario and some children said they would feel sad, some would feel angry if that happened to them.
- Afternoon Meeting- This is how we typically end our day. We do focus and calming activities such as yoga and meditation. We also have a piece of reflection using some prompt questions.
Thank you for taking time to read this post. Let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas that might work in our classroom.
See you at school!
Always,
Ms. Guerrero
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| The Bell Game (a community building activity) |
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| Ms. Castillo is very serious about getting rid of all the angry words!!! |
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| Adios!!! |
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| Angry and hurtful words do not belong in our school!!! |
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| Would you feel sad or angry? |
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| At the end of the day, what nice thing can you say about someone? |
