First Day!

First day of school... Check!

Third first day is in the books and I wanted to highlight my favorite activity that I've done every year so far. This is nothing new but it really does start off the year on the right foot. We all know what we expect of others and therefore what we should expect of ourselves. This activity is, "A Good Classmate is..." and "A Good Teacher is..."

I start off with a blank poster that says "A Good Classmate..." in the middle with four sections to describe what a good classmate is, what a good classmate does, what a good classmate says, and what a good classmate is not.



This is an example of what a good teacher is but I forgot to take a before picture of my classmate chart.

Next I simply opened this discussion up to groups. Students were grouped into tables and given a pack of colored sticky notes. They were asked to finish these sentence starters on separate sticky notes. They needed three in each section and boy did they come up with a lot!





I had students share their words before they added them to the board so that the entire class could hear all of their expectations of each other and so we didn't repeat any sticky notes.

Some ideas we discussed afterwards:

-All of those different colors represent the mix of groups that these ideas came from.
-We showed each tables "left over" sticky notes that didn't get hung up because they were already up there to discuss how we all often have the same expectations of ourselves and others in this classroom.
-We then began discussing classroom expectations that fit into what we all want in a good classmate and a good teacher.

After all of this brainstorming I created two lists of expectations that we will sign and agree to tomorrow!

(Miss DeFay is my year long student teacher. We will be co-teaching this year, how exciting!)


I love this activity because it gets students thinking about their expectations of others in the room. It helps to create a list of classroom norms that essentially was created by the entire class, although I got to change the wording so it encompasses more than just "be kind". Every year my students take great ownership over this lesson and I love seeing the great things they start to think about and write.

How do you set up class expectations in your room?