Class pledge

I know I have spoken about my year last year and how it was quite difficult.  One thing that I was constantly reflecting on throughout the year and over the summer was my behavior management.  While I have always felt confident with managing behaviors, I found myself questioning some of my techniques last year with such a challenging group.  It was also a tough mix of students that I feel even the best behavior expert would have had some trouble with managing them, too!  

The management aspect has been at the forefront of my thoughts this year.  During a workshop I attended one year, the presenter stated, "You can't teach a class that you can't manage."  How true that statement is!!!  With that being said, I wanted to start off this year with making sure that the students knew the expectations of our classroom and that we were going to hold them to those expectations.  We are constantly talking about being respectful of others and making sure our students are being treated fairly by all of us.  

At the beginning of the year, we made something similar to this for our class rules:

This is such a cute idea and the kids really enjoyed doing it and participating in it!  Our wording is a bit different and we shared the marker so that we wrote some words and the students helped write some of the words, too.  All of their self portraits came out quite interesting, too!!  I think we might have one devil-looking portrait on our wall ;)

After that, we started learning our class pledge that we say every day after our morning announcements come on.  I feel like this is a really nice way to start our day and our learning!  Here is what we say:

Our morning announcements usually consist of the Pledge of Allegiance and any news that we need to know for the day.  Once they are finished, my class stays standing and we raise our right hand and recite the pledge together.  I feel like it really sums up the expectations of the day, today and every day!  (anyone get that Lucy Calkins reference?!)

Until next time!