Use Communication to Build Classroom Relationships

Taking the time to establish relationships with your students and build a united classroom community helps lay the foundation for a positive and successful school year. Try these ideas for making students feel valued:

• For the first week or so of school, have a “question of the day,” which would be a daily question that students would answer about themselves. Team students up with different partners and have them interview one another. For young children, use their responses to questions to write a class experiential story or display responses as part of a class “Bio Board” or an “Introducing Us” bulletin board.
• Discuss with your students the characteristics of a team. Have a team building vocabulary word of the day or week, such as responsibility, cooperation, dependability, loyalty. Build lessons and activities around your terms.
• Divide your class into small groups or teams. Assign specific duties to each member. Have the group come up with a team name, symbol, logo, and mascot.
• Integrate team building activities into your curriculum. Students can work on a math problem as a team or write and solve a story problem, write a story about their team names and characteristics, tell how they chose their name or design a poster with the team name and a self portrait of each member. Additional activities might include reading a story as a team using buddy reading and presenting the story in play form to the rest of the class.

Source: Adapted from Tips for Building a Classroom Community, by Heather Craven and Emma McDonald, M.Ed., Inspiring Teachers Publishing; (877) 496-7633; www.inspiringteachers.com/tips/beginning/community.html.