Back to School! Are you ready to build a positive Classroom Community?!

With the Back to School season soon approaching, you are probably filled with a bunch of emotions. A bit of excitement, reflection, stress and more. For me, I have always been bummed that my summer freedom and time with family was ending and also excited! I felt happy to see my 1st graders turn into 2nd graders and excited to meet my new kiddos.

Build a positive Class Culture!

I don’t know about you, but I have found that building a positive classroom community is one of the most important things you can do right away (along with teaching your expectations and procedures). Those set the tone for how your class will function and help immensely with your behavior management.

I wish I had learned just how important a positive classroom community was for classroom management back in college. I spent hours thinking and researching ways to build that culture in my own room. After 8 years of trying things, tweaking things and creating things I have compiled my favorite activities, read aloud picture books and more into a resource that I hope helps your classroom as much as mine.

Each book suggestion has an activity, printable and/or anchor chart with a guide on how I used the materials in my own class! You can do the activities without those books, but I really chose the best books I have come across over the years. Be sure to check your library 1st before you buy them. I also love, love going to the thrift store to find my treasures, I mean books 😀 Places like YouTube, Epic (Free for teachers) and other places online might have them too.

Most of the activities have a printable resource for you to use! They integrate art, math and literacy throughout the resource! Some of the activities get your kids up and moving while others are for nice quiet times (I always did my 1st rounds of baseline data collection while the kids were working on the calm art activities! Hello multitasking!)

The anchor charts will really help guide your discussions and be something that you and your kiddos can refer to throughout the year.

A differentiated Class Book will help your kiddos get to know each other along with the other writing activities. You can differentiate the Math Get to Know You by doing different things with the numbers like adding, comparing, etc.

Having a calm, safe space for your students will be so important throughout the year. The anchor charts will help you teach social and emotional skills like 1. recognizing emotions, 2. problem solving small issues themselves, 3. ways to calm down. I put a little bin with some calm down items from the dollar store and thrift store in my calm area.

I don’t know about you, but when I was doing all of my courses for early childhood education, social and emotionally learning were so valued. So much focus is put on academic needs and technology that the social/emotional needs are put to the side. Ahhhhhh! Obviously, to raise competent human they need to be able to have social and emotion skills. Those skills, strategies and vocabulary need to be explicitly taught just like academics. I hope these help!

These activities engage my entire class and are able to be reached by all of my kiddos.

I think it is so important to make class rules with your kiddos. They have more ownership and buy-in when you create them together. I always have “my rules” in my mind and will hint or guide kids to bringing those up. We make a poster with lots of ideas, then consolidate them into a smaller set of rules that encompass theirs.

One of the things I love building right away is Growth Mindset! I came up with this activity to share ways that we can help each other. Everyone has natural strengths and things they need extra practice to succeed at. My Help Offered activity (explain more in my resource) helps kids feel like they are an important part of our community! 

Every day at the end of class we take a few minutes to give kuddos for kindness to one another using little pom poms and a jar. It is so important to recognize, draw attention & praise those kind words and actions (see blog cover picture to see my jar).

These writing activities not only bring us closer together, but I use them as my 1st writing sample for their portfolios! One writing piece let’s them explain what makes their heart happy while the other one is a class book (you know how I love my class books to build community and togetherness!)

I hope these are useful for you and your kiddos! Make sure to grab the FREEBIE below!

What do you do with your kiddos to build classroom community?