Back to Basics: Setting the Tone for a New School Year
min. readingOnce again, we find ourselves starting a new school year. It is a fresh opportunity to start well and set up for a great experience for everyone.
In light of this, here are some of the practical things I love doing to help set the tone for the school year.
Setting the tone isn’t always easy. When a child isn’t settling in, I’ll meet them one-to-one and try to love them through their mistakes. I stay positive while still holding them accountable for their behaviour, knowing that though I pour into them, I may not be the one who gets to see the change.
There’s no better way to start as you mean to go on than by ensuring everyone in class is on the same page. In light of this, here are some of the practical things I love doing to help set the tone for the school year!
1. Plan your Procedures
I cannot stress the importance of thinking through all the procedures in your classroom. Discuss and review them as often as necessary until the kids do them automatically.
You may have to review them a few times throughout the year to keep the kids on track, but I’ve found that if they know they’ll have to practise when they do it wrong, most often they will choose to do it right!
Make sure your procedures are things you can commit to using all day, every day consistently. Kids thrive when they know exactly what to expect.
2. Watching our Words
I am not sure where I first heard or read about “Crumple Girl”, but it’s an activity I do in the first week with every class I work with. It’s a superb way to build emotional intelligence among your students.
How to do the “Crumple Girl exercise”
- Take a large sheet of poster-size paper.
- Draw a very simple girl or boy (I like to mix it up each year) that covers the whole sheet of paper.
- Hold it up and ask kids to yell out mean things that kids might say to other kids that would cause hurt feelings.
- As they are calling them out, crumple the paper up into a tight ball.
- Ask them what they think about what just happened.
- After that, ask them to call out positive things they might say to make someone feel good.
- As they call those out, uncurl the paper.
- Smooth it out as much as possible and ask what they think / notice now.
They usually talk about how she looks better than she did after the insults, and they also usually talk about how we cannot get rid of all the wrinkles.
I use this to talk about how powerful our words can be and how the damage really never goes away fully once it is done.
We talk about thinking before words come out of our mouths and how we can be “day makers” or “day breakers”.
I have seen other people use things like a tube of toothpaste or other activities to drive the same point home. I like this one best, because I can leave the poster up all year.
The kids talk about it throughout the year and it is often one of the first things they show new students or visitors when they come to our room.
3. Finding our Family
On the first day, one of the discussions that I have with my new class is that once they are in my room, they are “my kids” for life. I tell them that we are a school family and we talk about what that means.
We talk about what being family means, because quite frankly, some of my students have never really experienced family in a strong, positive, and healthy way.