“…children are less likely to engage in bullying behaviors if they feel connected to their peers, to their teacher, and to the school as a whole. Research also shows that children who are targeted are often the children who are isolated from the group.” (pg. 44)
“There’s power in beginning every day with each child greeting classmates and being greeted in turn. Setting up a whole-group structure for this kind of beginning is an important way that you can help children get to know each other and feel that they belong.” (pg. 47)
“….responding to young children’s telling about small behaviors by saying, ‘I can see that you know our rule against cutting in line’ or ‘Thank you for letting me know that you know our rule.’ These responses honor children’s impulse to tell about things that are important to them while not getting overly involved with such relatively minor behaviors as cutting in line.” (pg. 82)
Connections:
I really like the idea of honoring a child’s attempt to tell on a classmate rather than cutting them off by saying “focus on yourself” or “don’t be a tattle tale”. I have heard other teachers say this and, quite frankly, in annoyance it can be easy to. However, in essence, they are showing me that they know a rule and are concerned with it. So, me responding to them in this way can be a respectful way to defuse their concern.
Children learning how to properly greet one another is such an important skill to learn at school. Even just learning how to say, “excuse me” when trying to squeeze by another student or to say “please” and “thank you”. These are priceless skills to learn and a teacher can be a safe adult who can help them learn these important skills that often are not taught in the home or given a chance to practice.
Idea
In Chapter 2, there is a fun section on how to “infuse academics with ‘getting to know you’ activities”. In this section, there are short survey ideas utilizing Venn Diagrams and graphs centered around student’s interests so that the class can get to know each other better. I immediately thought of Caren & Rusty’s class and how each class was started with an anonymous questionnaire that was graphed. Once everyone marked the graph with his or her answer (each graph had a question it posed), we would discuss the results. I loved seeing the results on the document camera and discussing what we noticed. This created a bond between individuals and the class as a whole. I would like to do these same surveys in my class right now.
The general attitude in our class is to focus on getting work done. However, there is not much time for getting to know one another in a non-academic way during class time with the supervision of teachers. I think that with an increase of children getting reprimanded for not focusing enough or for not being a respectful participant, fun activities like this could create a better classroom community. This would be a short but fun activity to let students make some real observations of the similarities and diversities in the classroom and also to learn how fun graphs are.