Shark Week

We're back at it for another great year at our school! Our first full week just ended and I think it has been just fantastic! I have loved getting to know a new group of children and families and I look forward to a great year with them!

Kindergarten is definitely a learning experience for all of us. New routines, new behavior, new teacher, new students.

One of the most important things that we can learn at the beginning of the year is how to behave and follow rules in school. I've done many things to help my children learn the rules, but when I read the book Clark the Shark for the first time I knew it was going to be my new back to school, learn the rules book!

Meet Clark. He's adorable and he loves school, but he is VERY excited and has a hard time controlling himself!

On our first day of school we read Clark the Shark and discussed his behavior at school and how we could relate that to our own classroom. Clark loves to scream so we talked about how to use our inside voices and when it is appropriate to use our excited or outside voice. Clark loves to play on the playground, but sometimes he plays too rough. We talked about the best way to treat each other on our playground. Clark has a hard time controlling anything because he is so excited. We talked about how we have to raise our hands and wait our turns in class and be respectful listeners.

On Thursday we read Clark the Shark Dares to Share. Clark struggles with how to share things with his friends and (again) control himself when a someone has something that he wants them to share. We talked about all of the different things that we share and how we should share things in our classroom.

After reading both stories, we discussed the different rules and I had the children each draw a picture and dictate a rule to me that will be important in our classroom for the upcoming year. I like to let the children decide what rules are important for our classroom. This way they can take ownership and be responsible for following them. To help really cement them in place, I found these great printables on pinterest and they were perfect.  The children did a great job remembering some of the important rules that Clark taught us. To help us remember, we made our very own sharks. I think they turned out pretty cute!!