At the beginning of the year . . .
I will focus a good amount of our time on establishing routine and procedures with the students. Mrs. Georgia Holt, the third-grade teacher at Gallatin Gateway School, explained to me that she front loads her class, meaning she deals with expectations early on in the year in a repetitive manner, allowing there to be more time for instruction later in the year because the class is well trained (G. Holt, personal communication, May 26, 2016). Transition times and instructional times go much smoother if the teacher dedicates the beginning of the year to them and does not give up if it doesn’t work right away.
In order to teach students about how to be safe, one of our four main rules, I will use the non-example/example activity. Here, students will come up with scenarios which could potentially be seen as unsafe and I will act out the wrong way to go about the situation and then the right way. (Of course, this will just be acting. No actual unsafe behavior will happen in the classroom). By seeing the right way to go about a situation after the wrong way, students will naturally already be thinking about how to fix the situation and then the right way will stick with them because it will be freshest in their brains. Additionally, I will explain a check-in method to students, where if I see them engaging in unsafe behavior, I will ask them to check in. By checking in, I mean asking themselves "safe or unsafe?" and then making a better choice. We will use the check-in method regularly in our classroom.
Regarding the procedure about obtaining help, I will have students create a drawing of their own hand which will explain what each hand signal means (below). We will complete this activity as a class in order to ensure every student understand how to obtain help. A strategy I will use to encourage this procedure is to remind students of how many fingers to hold up, spending time on this to allow for smoother transitions later in the year. Having a large poster that details all of the hand signals will help remind students to use this system as well. Finally, I will have to cover the difference between a question and a story. For young students, this is a hard concept to understand. To make this clear, I will give lots of examples from day to day, saying things like "questions start with 'what', 'who', 'how', 'why', or 'when'?"
In order to teach students about how to be safe, one of our four main rules, I will use the non-example/example activity. Here, students will come up with scenarios which could potentially be seen as unsafe and I will act out the wrong way to go about the situation and then the right way. (Of course, this will just be acting. No actual unsafe behavior will happen in the classroom). By seeing the right way to go about a situation after the wrong way, students will naturally already be thinking about how to fix the situation and then the right way will stick with them because it will be freshest in their brains. Additionally, I will explain a check-in method to students, where if I see them engaging in unsafe behavior, I will ask them to check in. By checking in, I mean asking themselves "safe or unsafe?" and then making a better choice. We will use the check-in method regularly in our classroom.
Regarding the procedure about obtaining help, I will have students create a drawing of their own hand which will explain what each hand signal means (below). We will complete this activity as a class in order to ensure every student understand how to obtain help. A strategy I will use to encourage this procedure is to remind students of how many fingers to hold up, spending time on this to allow for smoother transitions later in the year. Having a large poster that details all of the hand signals will help remind students to use this system as well. Finally, I will have to cover the difference between a question and a story. For young students, this is a hard concept to understand. To make this clear, I will give lots of examples from day to day, saying things like "questions start with 'what', 'who', 'how', 'why', or 'when'?"