A Bag of "Encouragemints"

This is the week that the older students at our school have the year end achievement tests.  At our school, every primary grade adopts an intermediate grade to give support to during this stressful time.  This year our first grade class is giving a bag of "Encouragemints" to our special friends in fifth grade.  Each bag of mints has a positive saying to help motivate each student.

We are hoping that a few "Encouragemints" will let our friends know that we care about them and believe in them.

We wish them the best on the test!  Have a great week:)

Classroom Friends

We have been talking a lot about being a good buddy to our classmates.  I love the slogan "Be A Buddy Not A Bully" because the students seem to remember it very easily.  We brainstormed action words that we could do to be a good buddy.  We came up with listen, share, care, take turns, be nice, use kind words, help, say hello, and smile.  

We wrote each word on a heart and placed them around our poster.  The most interesting part of our discussion was when we talked about words that would be the opposite of these words.  For example, the opposite of smile would be frown and the opposite of be nice would be mean.  These opposites could easily describe a bully.  We wanted to keep our poster positive so we just listed buddy words.  This activity was exactly what we needed at this time of year to help us focus on being good buddies to our classmates.

Motivational Mints

Each year our grade level "adopts" another grade level to support them on end of the year testing.  This really helps promote school community and encourages our students to think of others.  The students will usually make cards and posters for the class we are supporting.  This year, we also decided to make bags of mints with the saying "You are mint to do your best on the test!" 

Character Words

We each have a Vocabulary Journal to keep our words organized

Once a week our class focuses on a vocabulary word.  This year we have been working on character words.  The word is introduced on day 1 during our morning meeting.  We come up with a definition for the word and then one student will draw an illustration to show visually what the word means.  On day 2 we will review the word and then illustrate and write about the word in our vocabulary journals.  We try to use the word all week and by the end of the week we are very familiar with it.  The words are posted around the classroom for several weeks and then placed in a scrapbook so that we can always find our words when we need to refer to them. 

These are some examples of our character words

Kindness Counts!

 We had a fun time using up some extra heart frames.  I hate to waste anything, so after cutting hearts out of foam, I saved the frames.  To begin this activity, I asked every student to put his/her name on an index card and place it in a basket.  We then sat in a circle, and every child selected a card from the basket.  After reading the name on the card, each child drew a picture of that child in the heart frame.  They then wrote about something kind that the other child had done in the classroom this month.  This activity really focused on noticing positive behavior and how it influences each of us.