Perspectives

I tweeted a thought I had earlier today the tolerance is temporary, acceptance is permanent and we should all strive to be accepting. I'm not sure why, but this thought has been on my mind for a couple of days now. I think of life in general and how sometimes we tolerate actions of those around us. Sometimes those actions irritate and annoy us, but we tolerate them in hopes that the actions will go away.  In the classroom, we need to learn acceptance. A child comes in on the first day with all he/she is. It is our responsibility to accept that the child will have faults just like we as adults do and our responsibility to accept the child's faults and build on the child's strengths. To do this we have to build a community in our classroom. Make our classroom a safe environment. By a safe environment, I mean a place where the child feels safe to be who he or she is and feels comfortable talking to you as the adult. In this community, it becomes possible to find our the child...

Ideas were passed around at my last team meeting about creating a calendar through the year that was meaningful to the kids and parents. We wanted something that parents could look at when they drop off and pick up their children. We all decided that in the hallway outside our doors we would have a place for each month of the school year. We will choose 2 pictures that represent what we learned about or was special that month and we would have the children create a piece of artwork to display under the pictures. We are hoping that this will be a way for us to build community in our families and classrooms throughout the year.  What are some of your ideas that you use for building community? 

I was going through my things and came across an idea by Teaching Strategies I thought was neat. The basic idea is have a place for Students and Teachers to write on a note other students they notice being kind. For younger students writing the friends name and drawing a picture of the kindness they saw their friend do is sufficient. I have been looking for ways to promote kindness in my classroom and I'm thinking this will be in my class this year :)