Building Community is Vital

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Home : 2001 : July : 2

Building Community is Vital
By Donna

My best year in 4th grade was the year I spent a lot of time on building a sense of community in our classroom. I highly recommend these two books:

Building Character and Community in the Classroom from Creative Teaching
Press, and
Teaching Students to Get Along, by Lee Canter.
Canter's book has a wonderful class pledge that
we said every morning after the school's Pledge
of Allegiance.
He also has a reproducible called We Don't See Eye to Eye. I leave these out next to a mailbox. When students are having problems with each other, they fill out a form and put it in my mailbox. Then

I have them get together and talk about it. It keeps me from having to solve all their problems.
Don't worry about getting a late start of your 'real' lesson plans. You will not regret the time you spend on building a sense of community.