Choice Lit Topic: Community Building
It’s one of the big paradoxes of literacy instruction – students best learn how to read and write independently when they have a strong community of support in classrooms. How teachers build those thoughtful, kind, and challenging classroom communities is explained in these resources.
Results
Every Language Counts: Adding Multilingual Counting Activities to Morning Meeting
Every year I have children who come from homes with many different first languages. In the past year alone, first languages included English, Spanish, Hmong, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Russian. One...
Let’s Get Some Attitude
"All our attitudes come out in language," says English maven Robert MacNeil. Not just thoughts. Not just ideas. Not just imaginings. Attitudes. Maybe that's part of what's missing in those...
Boys’ Book Club in Second Grade
"The girls started it." That's how Linda remembers book clubs were born in second grade. Two girls had become interested in the Warriors series by Erin Hunter and...
The Difference Between Conferring and “Touching Base”
Sometimes when I talk with teachers about creating "the luscious feeling of endless time," they look at me like I've lost my mind. They tell me they love the idea,...
Whole Class Interviews: Building Community in Writing Workshop (TEMPLATE)
As I begin to set up my classroom, I can't help but think back to Jonathan's comment on our last day of school a few years ago in June. We...
Connection Points: The Sambusa Was the Key
Filsan walked in carrying a pillow of paper towels, the school kind—you know, the light brown color, the scratchy texture that doesn’t actually absorb anything. The smile on her face,...
Building Community Around Food and Poetry
The chef James Beard is quoted as saying, “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.” We must all eat food to live, but food is much more than just...
Using Me Boxes to Promote Identity, Academics, and Play
The importance of including more play has been on Kate’s mind in her first-grade classroom for the past few years. It's a newer concept to her. It just wasn’t a...
Play Is Powerful: Sharing Student Learning with Families
Sitting on the sidelines at a soccer practice, I overheard some parents discussing their children’s new teachers. One of them was the mother of a child in my class. My...
Book Matchmaker: Read Alouds That Invite Young Readers to Participate
There is nothing like a great story that naturally invites readers to join in. Our youngest students love those repeated phrases, and don’t need a prompt to jump right into...
Using 9/11 Research to Build Community and Writing Process
It seems unreal to me that the students who sit in front of me have no personal knowledge of the events that transpired on September 11, 2001. To them, it’s...
Building Community Access to Texts Through a Lending Library
Stories affirm our experiences. They challenge our comfort zone. They give us space to hibernate and pull us out of our isolation when we need to be reminded we aren’t...
Trusting the Letting-Go Moments
Last year we started school with lots of joy and inquiry. My students arrived and were greeted with monarch eggs and milkweed on the windowsill. Sticky notes were available to...
Lifting the Quality of Peer Response
Helping children learn to listen to each other well and give feedback takes a great deal of time. For many years, I just assumed that kids intuitively knew how to...
Connecting with Students at Home
Our first three days of remote learning were a whirlwind. I created lessons for my third-grade students and posted them for the students to access and complete. Students did the...
Overcoming: Helping Students Process Covid Feelings
My son Ryan and I were in his room, playing basketball with the hoop on his closet door. I was sitting high on his loft bed and shooting “threes;” he...
Word Study Literacy Team Meeting
The literacy team is a group of teachers who meet once or twice a month to study and discuss literacy across the whole school. The team consists of...
Classroom Tours: Learning from Colleagues
A few years ago we had someone from outside our school community do a walkthrough of classrooms in our building, to help us figure out how we could create better...
In Praise of Handwritten Notes
When asked what was the most important thing she wanted to teach her students, long-time kindergarten teacher Isabel Beaton replied, "The art of gracious living!" Whether you're five or fifty,...
A Hand to Hold: Crying and Community in Preschool
It was January, the time when I look forward to being able to do more extensive, focused, and creative lessons with my preschoolers. By January, early fall’s focus on developing...
