Classroom Rules, part 2

On August 5 I told you about a new idea that I had to introduce the classroom rules at the beginning of the school year. (If you missed that post, you can read it here!)  I'm excited to tell you that I had my students complete the activity and it was awesome!!! 

Here's a quick overview of the activity:

• First, I came up with 3 simple rules: Respect Yourself, Respect Others, and Respect Our Classroom.
• I put my students into groups of 3-4 and asked them to brainstorm the meanings of each of the rules. (What does it mean to Respect Yourself?)  I told them to do their brainstorming as a concept web, and demonstrated this briefly on the Smart Board.
• After 6 minutes (2 minutes per rule!) we came back together as a class and listed several of their ideas on the Smart Board.
• I printed each slide at the end of the period so I had a record of each class' responses.
• After school I went through and picked out the most common answers given by the classes.
• Finally, I printed those answers onto bright paper and used them to form a concept web around the rules.  These will stay up as a reminder to the students!

As I said, it was awesome!  I was really impressed by the quality of their responses.  Here's some pictures of the final result:

This is how they look hanging in the front of my room.  In hindsight I think I would have printed the student responses a bit larger, and if I have a chance I might redo them, but I still like the way it turned out. :)

And here are close-up pictures of each of the rules so you can see the thoughtful responses that my students gave!

Oh, and I know the rules look different than they did in my first post (they were on a chevron print).  I came across this cute zebra print border just before school started, so at the last minute I changed the rules - and also my learning targets board (see top picture) - to match the border. :)

I would HIGHLY recommend this activity, and although I teach middle school, I think it could work well for any age group.

Rachel