Reviewing Expectations and Routines
At the beginning of the year, I spent a lot of time rehearsing routines with my students, reviewing expectations, practicing what we should and should not do throughout the day, and generally working to establish some solid foundations for what we will do each day. As a result, we had a really strong start to the year.
We review expectations every day, but I haven’t been taking time to go over the routines as often, because we do them all the time. As the end of the first semester draws near, I’ve noticed that many of the students have been getting a little loose with following the routines we’d established at the beginning of the year.
I want us to end the first semester (and the calendar year) on a high note, so we have been reviewing our beginning and end of the routines. These are the two times of day that we have the least structure in the room. At the beginning of the day, we have students coming in, making lunch choices, turning in homework or other mail, sharpening pencils, writing in journals, and trying to talk to me. There are also students asking to use the restroom, coming in late, and all sorts of miscellaneous activities. On top of all this, the class needs to be listening for our morning announcements, which include a moment of silence, the school promise and the Pledge of Allegiance. We are reviewing what the students should be doing during all this time and working on getting back to our “A” game.
Our end of the day routines are also important to restore. Students write our “Today’s Topics” in their C.O.Y.O.T.E. binders, stack chairs, clean off desks, and pick up loose items from the floor. The last three parts have gotten especially disorganised, so we spent a considerable amount of time this afternoon going over them again. We didn’t do great, so we will continue to practice until we can get back to the level of excellence that we worked so hard to establish at the start. My hope is that if we end the semester on a strong, positive note, we’ll be set to get started with the second half of the year where we left off.
It is all about not just practicing, but practicing the right way!
This entry was posted on December 12, 2012 by Alex T. Valencic. It was filed under Fourth Grade, Personal Reflection, Social & Emotional Learning, Teachers' Secrets .
Hi there, I’m changing from teaching 5th and 6th grade to teaching 4th from January. Thanks for your blog, it’s a valuable read for me. Please explain a bit… you say you review expectations daily. When and how do you do this?
Thanks
December 26, 2012 at 4:25 pm
Elizabeth,
Thanks for coming by again! I review expectations and routines in a variety of ways. I have our classroom expectations posted on the board in the front of the room and refer to them frequently throughout the day. At the beginning of the year, I had my students make posters for some of our most common routines (such as lining up, getting mail, and sharpening pencils) and have them posted throughout the classroom.
Every morning my students write in their journals for about 5-10 minutes, responding to a prompt that I have posted when they enter the room. During the last two weeks of the semester, the prompts referred to different expectations or routines and asked the students to write about them in detail: what is expected, what it looks and sounds like, why we do it, etc.
When we return next week, I will be doing an in-depth review of the expectations and routines each day, modeling, practicing, modeling again, and practicing again. The students may grumble about this, but I remind them that, just as we practice multiplication facts so that they can get better at remembering them, we practice our routines and expectations so that they can get better at setting a positive example for the other students in the school. (Also, it helps that I have a jar we fill with glass pebbles each time the students receive a compliment from another teacher, and they know they will get more compliments if they are following expectations! When the jar is filled, we have a small class celebration, such as a movie or extended preferred activity time in the room.)
Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help you with your transition! You can leave comments here or
email me (alex.t.valencic @ gmail.com. Good luck!
December 31, 2012 at 8:08 am