Skip to main content

3 Strategies to Build Positive Peer Relationships


http://www.adderworld.com/blog1/2009/12/31/interview-relationships-and-2010-another-new-year/



There is a need to create a peaceful climate in the class. Teachers have to treat their students as individuals. Students need respect, love, and care. I have noticed how adults can be sarcastic towards children. They frequently interrupt their students, and often admonish them in front of others. It takes patience, perseverence, and practice, and we all need to start working on being model citizens.

However, children can be equally insensitive to each other. In order to build positive peer relationships, I have decided to use 3 strategies I have not used before:


Creating a photo album. I simply love this idea! I am always snapping pictures of my students during the different stages of a project in order to record the journey of their learning. This usually goes up on the bulletin board. Sometimes, I give the children their pictures to put in their portfolio; the rest go into a unit folder as evidence of some kind of practice or the other. I think this is a great strategy to showcase the students’ work to the parents during PTCs. When students finish their work early, they could decorate the album by sticking, drawing or creating borders and writing captions. It’s a great way to integrate art and language. There will also be a sense of collectiveness as everyone will get a chance to participate in its creation. (Jones & Jones, 2007)

Secret Pal books. This activity will immediately appeal to my 8 year olds. Anything secretive is fun. I specially need it for a few students who are keen at pointing out deficiencies of others. They will, hopefully, undergo a paradigm shift! Using icecream stick, students will pick a name of their peer. Throughout the week, they will observe their peer and note down all the positive things they see about them. In class, we have covered adjectives. My students also enjoy writing acrostic poems. They could use these skills to describe their friend. This will be a great center work where they could revisit these skills while learning to appreciate their peers. ( Jones & Jones. 2007). By the end of the week, they will share their Secret Pal book with their friend.

I would like to incorporate another strategy using technology. I think Wallwisher is the perfect web 2.0 tool for this. I like the idea of positive bombardment. My students are learning to use thinking stems in order to express themselves. Using the stems: I felt really happy when…or, You are really a friend because …will help my students with their writing when they create their blog posts. This method of communication will be extremely powerful, as parents will also get to read all the great things other students have to say about their child.

I will consciously monitor my words and behaviour  towards my children. I will put all my facial muscles into action and SMILE more often. I hope to see more love and affection among my students. I hope to see change. The sooner, the better!


Reference:
Jones, V., & Jones, L. (2007). Comprehensive classroom management: Creating communities of support and solving problems(Laureate Education, Inc., custom ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.





Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...
Post a Comment
Read more

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...
Post a Comment
Read more

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

  Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about  things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others.  A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...
Post a Comment
Read more