One Teacher's Adventures

I'm lucky this year.   I share two Grade 8 classes full of kids who are genuine, respectful, and compassionate of others.  I talk with my partner teacher all the time about how nice our kids are.  I wanted to make sure that the students, themselves, knew how nice they are.  I decided to put up a "Finding Kindness" bulletin board in my room where students could recognize an act of kindness and post it for the other kids to see. After one day, it was already getting full!  It wasn't hard to find the kindness in our school, but I notice now that the kids are looking for it everywhere.  They want to be able to put up a post about other kids, not only in their own classes, but in the hallways, outside, and everywhere. Do you do something similar in your school?  Let me know in the comments below.

Today was the last day of classes in my district.  While I am very ready for the summer break, I will definitely miss my group of Grade 4s.   As a year-end gift, I decided to create a Wordle for my partner teacher with all of our students' names.  Wordles are word clouds that you can make for free ( click here ).  You simply type text into the wordle box, and the program generates a word cloud that you can edit for font, colour, and configuration.  The program uses an algorithm that increases the size of words that are repeated more often. My Wordle looked like this: I loved this so much that I decided to something similar, but more special, for the kids.  First, I gave every student a page with all their classmates names on it.  I asked them to write down three words to describe everyone else in the class.  (We brainstormed a list of about 50 or 60 positive adjectives before they began and I wrote them all on the chalkboard). Then I...

Last year, I taught grade 4/5 in a small school.  Over 1/4 of all the students in the school were in my class (30 out of 110)!  Because we were a small school, there was only one class per grade, so for most of my students, they had been with the same friends in the same classes since Kindergarten.  By the time they came to me, they were a little sick of each other. I had a lot of fighting within friend groups in the class, several meetings with parents, desk switches almost every week, and regular visits with the counselor.  When those strategies didn't work, I decided to try something new.  I wanted my students to come up with kind things to say about one another.  We started playing team building games in gym and I was trying to recognize when students did nice things for each other. I also wanted each student to know how special they were to the class.  I gave every student a copy of the class list and asked them to write down one nice thing ab...