For All of You Parents Out There

It’s a bit early to be thinking about heading back to school, but I just came across this video and thought some of you might be able to relate to it. Enjoy!

Welcome Back!

Welcome Back to School! And welcome to Seventh Grade!! After only a few days with my new students, I know we are going to have an absolutely, amazingly awesome year! How do I know this? Well, I’m a teacher. I just know. 🙂  If you’d like specifics about how I know it’s going to be a fantabulous year, let’s start with Our Rights and Responsibilities.

To begin our year together, I asked my students to answer the following question: What are your rights and responsibilities in our seventh grade classroom? They worked on their lists individually at first, and then they discussed and added to their lists at their table groups. While they were working in their groups, I started asking students to write some of their ideas up on the ActivBoard to share them with the entire class. I think you’ll agree that, so far, my new students have some great ideas! Here’s what we have so far:

Our Rights

We have the right to…

• learn in our own way
• read what we want to during silent reading
• ask questions
• be creative
• wear anything [that follows] the appropriate dress code
• have recess twice a day
• pray
• have water at our desk
• say the Pledge of Allegiance
• choose our own supplies

Our Responsibilities

We have the responsibility to…

• keep our books in good shape
• respect our teachers
• manage good grades
• know right from wrong
• stand up for our friends
• stay safe
• do our schoolwork
• be reverent in church [I know a certain math teacher who will love that!]
• listen to the teacher
• show up on time
• keep our desks and lockers clean
• pay attention in class
• stay organized
• write in our planners
• use our rights appropriately
• assist our classmates
• treat classmates with respect

The idea behind creating these lists was to start thinking about what our three main class rules should be for this year. Yesterday, each group had to synthesize all of these rights and responsibilities into three possible rules. On Monday we will vote for the top three and those will be our class rules that we all agree to abide by this year.

One item worthy of note: I found it amazingly awesome that every single one of the notecards the groups handed me contained the word “respect”!

So, do you agree with me now? It’s going to be a wonderful year!!

 

P.S. The video at the beginning of this post is a Google Search Story that I created to welcome my seventh graders to a new school year.

Happy New Year’s Eve!

Happy New Year to one and all! May 2012 bring you many blessings along with plenty of warm memories!

 

YouTube Space Lab

Attention Science Fans! Are you ready to go into outer space? Well, I may not be able to help you with that, but the folks at YouTube might be able to at least send one of your science experiments into space. You can find more information here: Coming to a Universe Near You.