After falling asleep last night around 1 a.m., I promptly woke up at 7 a.m. thinking I was late for the first day of school! Realizing I had better things to do than lay around, I jumped up and read the entire first chapter of The First Six Weeks of School by Paula Denton and Roxann Kriete. My partner teacher thrust it into my hands before I left school on Friday saying, "You'll want to read this."
She was right. It is a locally published book- but actually does a terrific job of outlining what it truly means to "build community" and "create a culture of trust." Everybody says they do these things- but this book explicitly outlines how to do them. I must say it goes right along with the social well-being that is so focused on here in Washington. Social curriculum is as important as academic curriculum (I do agree with this statement- but when do we have time?)
These first 80 pages can be summarized by saying that students need to function with autonomy; meaning that students must function independently without constant adult control. I must say I don't have a problem with this in my classroom- but I am determined to refine my teaching this year! Another important belief in this book is that the greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction- again, I agree and I have done this in the past- but certainly I have room for improvement! Lots of explicit modeling of expectations and lots of getting-to-know you activities for both student-to-student and teacher-to-student.
On to finish the book today and plan out more lessons for the first week. Luckily it is divided into sections for the different grade levels: K-2, 3-4 and 5-6. Bring on the new ideas!
We actually did a whole school book study on this book one year. It worked really well for the teachers that put it into practice.
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I loved the ideas of creating classroom hopes and dreams and posting them and then revisiting them later in the year. So great!