1. Do you trust your students? How do you build this trust? Are you able to trust them and allow them to be independent throughout all aspects of your day? Are you going to be able to stay out of their way?
I think that I do trust most of my students most of the time. There are some times in our day, especially transitions, in which I've been thinking I need to be more in control of them. For example, when some are finished with lunch, we sometimes ask them to wash their hands and wait for us in the hallway, but they often become rowdy and run down the hall and get crazy when alone. I was thinking I need to take them or send them with an assistant, but maybe the answer is to teach them to respect our community and rules and trust them to behave well? I will work on this! Generally, however, I trust them. We have time each day when the children work on Montessori games, and most of them are able to work nicely and follow instructions (such as we are working independently now, or working with one friend quietly). There is one in my class, who is just so sneaky! He has to be watched all the time! Any advice?
2. How much choice do you give your students throughout the day? Do you go over your daily schedule with your students or is it just "posted" in the room?
I am very bad about doing the daily schedule. At my last school, I had it posted and we often went over it in the morning. At this school, however, it just never got made. One of my challenges here is that we don't have a lot of space to hang things on the wall, and my director does not like us to use sticky tack to put things up. I have allowed that to limit me a lot this year, but next year I will make these things a priority. Maybe we will have less space to hang up art, but we can change it more often? I definitely do want to make a set of class activities with pictures, and I'd like to go over it each morning during our morning circle.
3. How are you going to create that sense of community where students will hold each other accountable?
I think part of creating the sense of community is really getting to know each child at the beginning of the year. I like to have time for children to share each morning, and to get to know each other in the beginning of the year. We often assign buddies the first few weeks of school, and pair children with new children or bilingual children with those who don't yet speak much English. I sometimes pair the boys and girls just to get them to make friends with children they often don't play with. There are a lot of ideas in the The Morning Meeting Book, which I meant to implement this year. I at least did the morning greetings each day but never really got past that. This is another book I need to spend more time with this summer! I do think it's important to spend some time each day building community, as it can help prevent a lot of problems later. One tip is just saying good morning to each other with names every morning. Easy, but it makes a big difference. Everyone feels welcomed and loved, and they start to have that sense of community. I do also try to encourage children to talk to each other and not come running to me every time someone misbehaves, but this is not always working. I need to spend more time in the beginning of the year talking about our rules and why we have them and what we can do when we or someone we see is having trouble with them.
4. Student ownership in learning? How do you instill this in every child?
I think it is important to let children know why they are doing each activity. I also want children to have the desire to be the best they can be, so I have started talk about this with my kids. One of our class rules is "Do your best," but we had never really talked about WHY we should do it. Last week we had a discussion about it, and we started to try self-evaluations. We would work on an activity and I would ask the children to show me how they think they are doing. If they think they are doing their best, they show a thumbs up. If they think they could do better, they show me a thumb pointing to the side. It's surprising how honest many of them can be, and I really feel it helps them start to develop this sense of ownership in their learning as well as their behavior. I don't want to be the one judging them and correcting them all the time. I want them to be able to look at themselves and see what they can improve and what they do well.
5. Stamina! How are you going to build stamina with reading? Independent work? Will you use a timer? Will you set goals?
This is really something I want to work on, and I have downloaded some of the worksheets from Pinterest, which show the goals of reading for five minutes and then longer. After lunch each day my children take a book to "read" alone or with a friend, and some of the children could do it for ages, but many are always asking, can we play yet? Can we draw? I think that setting goals and using a visual representation of how long we've been doing something will really help a lot! I will be excited to get started with this in September. I think Caitlin did make a good point that we need to make sure the children are not so focused on the time goal that they don't focus on what's important. Children can be very competitive! However, I think this will not happen if we review why we are doing what we are doing, and continue to self-evaluate the work they are doing and not just the timing. It is all connected, though, isn't it?
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